by Rod Madocks
I might not have been able to find Bartlet but this English old world scene teems with suspects, it’s close-packed like an old-time Sherlock Holmes murder mystery. Crime around my own parts is a different deal. There have been no murders near here in more than 10 years but when they do happen it seems like people disappear into a vacuum. Girls disappear like Georgia, killed by drifters, the truth is never found, and the families’ loss is left to be eroded by the hungry years. The crimes we do have these days are mainly thefts. Also the Net tells me that there are 51 registered sex offenders in our little town. Jeez, that sounds a lot, that’s one for every 200 or so inhabitants. I’m not sure why they are all here. Maybe they know something I don’t.
It’s no accident that I’m drawn to guilt and to secrets. Maybe that why I’ve also chosen this little town to hide out in—I’ve got stuff of my own to cover up. You could say I was dogged by bad spirits. I’ll tell you about it before long. Maybe that’s why I’ve been drawn to John Lee’s recordings. His tales of grue with ghosts is an antidote to how bland life can be here. We are a hopeful people. We want to dare to live the dream. In America, we always seem to be looking for salvation and redemption stories to keep us alive. “Learning today, leading tomorrow’. That was my High School motto. But I didn’t join all those activities that could have shaped me: best buddy groups, American Field Service and National Honor Society. Nope, I just stayed in, playing Kings Quest at night and learning all those Latin words in secret. That’s why now I’m drawn to that hollow- face Lee character, instead of joining my peers who are chasing the Dream, raising families, chillaxin with a brew or sharing honey wings at Fat Boyz downtown.
Spool Two
O the hog-eye man is the man for me
Babbacombe, March 1884
—Spring was a hard time for the fishermen at Babbicam. There weren’t much to eat, you see. Maybe March is hard all over the world. I’ve seen the snow at the window. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll see the sun again. Good of you to come out on a day like this.
Doctor Kaiser: You were saying last time that things had gotten tough where you were working?
—Ess, you could say so. I’ve been thinking a lot more about it all since starting with all this recording business. I’ve been remembering how at some stage I got news from Millie. She was in service in Newton Abbot and wrote that she had arranged for me to meet someone special. Her name was Katie Fisher and she lived with her mother on Grafton Terraces at Ellacombe in Torquay town. She knew Millie because her house was a few doors down from my Auntie Amelia. Millie often visited my Auntie. Millie came to town by train and we all met at the Pleasure Gardens. Katie was an ’andsum girl, always turned out nicely too, hats with feathers and the like. A nice face with kind cob-brown eyes, a top-heavy maid like a pouter pigeon and with little weak ankles. She was good to me though. Katie had good schooling, a bit shy but her head was full of dreams. I found no end of those ‘sensation’ books hid away in her bedroom. She liked me too and we soon struck up an understanding. Millie warned me to look after her and to mind how I went, not to run at gates and make a mess o’ things. Sweet Millie, I thought she looked awful thin when I saw her and she had this cough that would not go away. She said she caught it at the Glen with all that cold and damp. She also warned me about Lizzie, said she was a wild, self-seeking girl with gentry blood in her.
Doctor Kaiser: Weren’t you worried that Lizzie would find out and be jealous?
—I never said anything about Katie to Lizzie. She’d sniff me out anyway. We’d stay up late after prayers with an ear for the mistress’ tread down the corridor. Lizzie pinched the Missis’ Madeira but I refused it. I’ve never drunk likker on account of not wanting to be like my Pa. Well, I should say I’ve not drunk ‘til a few years back when I did let go with a bottle of brandy. That made me prapper sick and tissicky and I spilled out all sorts of nonsense to the neighbors. Said more than I should have.
Lizzie wasn’t so fussy about drinking and could knock it back. She’d roll about on my bed, her hair springing up from under her cook’s cap, taunting at me about who I was a-courting. She used to say that all the Lees were cold, always turning their backs on her. Then she’d ask me for a goodnight kiss and pull my hands over her. She frit me with her passions. I liked to be the cock bird, the one in charge. When I in turn tried to hold her she’d knock me back, telling me not to buck her hair. Much later in the nights, I’d go creeping up to her room but more often than not the sheets would be thrown back with just a shape let in the bed where she had been lying. The backstairs nursery door would usually be left open with only the sound of the sea outside.
Doctor Kaiser: So, you began to date Katie?
—I suppose so. We’d call it ‘walking out’. I’d see Katie on Saturdays. We’d stroll around and watch the gentry at the big hotels or stand outside Shapleys on the Strand and smell the coffee, cheeses and hams. I’d promise her that I’d get her good things like that one day. Or we’d go up past Anstey’s Cove where the Sunday trippers went and up above Babbicam Bay on Walls Hill by the quarries. We liked to look out over the sea. I’d explain that the mewie birds were the spirits of dead sailors and such. She liked my stories. She had troubles of her own, poor girl. Her mother had been ailing with a cancer eating into her breast, and the family were in want of money. Katie took in pieces of work of an evening to pay the doctor’s bills. She had one brother who had left home and one younger brother, Ernest. She worried what would become of the boy. I told her that all would be well. Fat lot I knew.
Babbicam was full of beady eyes and all the old witches liked to pick the bones of gossip. One night after prayers Miss Keyse summoned me to the parlor and told me that a lady should not have to put up with irregularity in her household; there should be no ‘communing with undesirables’. She told me to keep to the house more. I told her I was not keeping bad company but she said that any company was bad company for me.
Miss Keyse probably told Lizzie to make sure I stayed in more though I managed to send Katie little notes and messages. We’d also meet in Marychurch while I was supposed to be on my errands. Miss Keyse rarely stirred between nine of an evening and prayers at ten thirty and it was also safe then for me to go out then, running along Marychurch Street down to Ellacombe for an hour or so. Here, I would cram up to Katie in her bedroom where she would allow me liberties while her mother groaned and gasped in the next room. She wouldn’t let me to lift her skirts though, always saying, “Not yet, Jack, not yet” Then I’d pull away and go running back to Babbicam along all the back ways. I nearly ran into trouble on some of those nights. Cutting back down the cliffs in the dark by the Oddicombe path I’d see men, sometimes a dozen or so, outlined against the grey moonlit sea. Humped with bales and chests coming up the cliff path. I’d hide in the bracken until they passed. Sometimes I’d look up and see the blue spurt of a match against the headland high above. Other watchers were always up there.
Doctor Kaiser: So, who were those fellows?
—Smugglers, doc. Bringing in stuff off the French boats. I’d come across them before when I worked for the Brownlows. They weren’t around so much in the summer months, too many folk milling about then with all the trippers. You knew summer had arrived when they’d dragged out those big white bathing machines from Gasking’s yard and bumped them down over the shingle. The Cary Arms garden would get all filled up and little nappers swarmed the rock pools with hand nets. The fish catch would usually pick up then also and lines of ponies went up the cliff path carrying fish baskets to Newton Abbot market. About then Miss Keyse used to send me out to note down which fishermen were too close to her house. She threatened Mr Templer on them. She refused to see Harris or Gasking to sort out the matter and an angriness grew further between her and the fishermen.
I started to reel other maids into my nets. Meeting Katie had made me brave though really I see now it was all foolish pride. Maybe also it was a way at getting back at Lizzie. Anyway, I thought I could range free among t
he Marychurch housemaids, barmaids, nursery-girls and fishermen’s daughters. One was Eliza Maile, a pretty housemaid from Shaldon. I had taken to chatting to her and making all sorts of promises on those garden seats in the Glen grounds when I should have been working. I found that I could easily keep up a foxy double-dealing way which meant that no-one really knew what I was about. For me then, the truth could be whatever I thought it should be at the time.
I spent most time with Katie on Saturday half days. Sometimes she wept for her mother’s sickness but usually she tried to hide her grief from me. She fed me, she allowed me to fumble at her and she listened to my ranting on about Miss Keyse. She gave me a steadiness, a chance to be admired. Heaven knows what she saw in me. I suppose I gave her hope of a settled life. In time we went out and about less. I told her that the Missis was always spying on me. It suited me to keep her out of the way, my life was getting all snarled up. Lizzie kept calling me a ‘ram-cat’ every time I came back from Ellacombe. That’s Deb’m for a tom, you know. Miss Keyse started to pile jobs on me. Once I told her I could not manage on two and six a week and needed to know if she could give me a character. She flew into a fizzing rage and said I was going on most unsuitable and needed to buck up. I could have swung for her right then but one of the Necks came by. The old crow reminded me that I’d have done even more time at Exeter clink if she had not spoken up for me at the magistrates. “Think on” she kept on saying, “think on.” I was thinking alright.
I fell into staying out late and sometimes I’d come back to the Glen and slam the doors to frit the Necks. They got on my goat. Days would pass when I didn’t see Katie and she’d send notes asking if I was well. However much I sniffed around the other girls, I still kept coming back to Lizzie. I spied on her and chased her but she’d pulled away since Katie had come on the scene. If she found me creeping up to her rooms more often than not she would yell that I was a daw-bake and slam the door. I kept filling up with angry feelings. About this time on one of my shopping trips for the Missis I spent my money on a knob-ended cane from Mr Salter’s although I could scarce afford it. I used to knock the heads off Miss Keyse’s flowers and waved it at the rough lads in St Marychurch and ask if they wanted a lick of it.
Doctor Kaiser: Weren’t you scared of getting into trouble with the police again?
—Everyone seemed to be down on me and I was beginning not to care. The Glen was always surprising me by unlooked-for visitors. One such was Tom Bennet the coast guard officer. He kept bothering me and asking if I had seen anything of a night. When I denied it, he threatened me, said I was a bad ’un, one word from him would get me in trouble with Torquay police. All had their hand against me; so it seemed. Miss Keyse must have seen Bennet scratching around, for she came to my room at night and whispered with her dunghill breath, “I will protect thee, John but you must be a good boy.” It would seem better in the daylight. I’d go up the cliffs and watch for the blue shadows of warships out at sea. I could have been with that channel fleet if only I had been luckier. You could see so far at Babbicam—not like this muddy Milwaukee light, the air full of taint from the factories and such.
Doctor Kaiser: Tell me more about what was really happening between you and this Miss Keyse.
—I don’t like to say it. She was like a bad-smelling cloud all over the place. In the hot afternoons there was the distant thuds from the quarrymen blasting, that seemed to shake the air. Miss Keyse kept on complaining of the creaking and clicketting of the capstans and the rough songs the men sang. She was always asking what “hog eye” meant. She must have heard the sailors singing it. The Necks said they knew not what it meant. Lizzie said she was a silly old woman, all the girls and boys knew what a hog-eye was. [sounds on the recording, coughing/ laughter?] It wasn’t just Miss Keyse, doc. I was in trouble every which way. I kept away from the night beaches for fear of the coastguard and of what else moved there in the dark. Still, trouble seemed to find me. I courted maids whenever I could, something drove me to it. I was now surrounded by women. I could often hear Lizzie singing in the kitchen, “O, the hog eye man is the man for me; he comes a sailing straight from the sea.” She did it to get a rise out the Necks I suppose. She would not explain the bruises she had on her arms and neck. When I tried coming up to her she would slip from my arms with a biting word. She now kicked the kitchen door shut when she took her bath.
I sometimes peeped on the female bathers by the shore. Harrington was often sniffing about there also. He was usually perched somewhere whittling with a big sailor knife, his pipe puffing, his eyes busy watching. Those blue-green eyes looked at you like they were getting to the marrow. He always seemed to be drawing me back into a game I could not understand, holding out a hand to me—but to what purpose I did not know. I felt myself pulled to him like a boat that drags its anchor in a rip tide. Maybe I wanted to be like him because he did not hide his true nature; you see, I did not know my own nature at all.
Harrington got me into trouble with those Fey girls. He seemed to know about my tom cat ways. “You do pick ’em,” he used to say, “they come at you like flies.” He offered to arrange for a meeting with two sisters in service to the Mount-Temples. We cornered them on the Ilsham footpath. One was called Sarah, quiet and deep she was, and the other was Mary Ann, a fair haired maid who kept gabbling on ten to the dozen. That Harrington was a silver- tongued bravo, he got them to drink cider with us in the bracken. They soon were drunk and Mary Ann was mizzy-mazy. She kept on about how the gulls spoke in God’s language. Harrington kept on filling them up with cider until they were rolling about as drunk as drumbledranes. He got me to choose which one I wanted. I chose Mary Ann, God knows why. Harrington laughed about it at the time saying everyone to his own taste as the old woman said as she kissed the hoss’s arse.
That broken bracken gave off a sharp stink. Can smell it still. I felt sick when I pulled away from Mary Ann. Her goosegog eyes had never left the circling gulls as I rolled her onto her back. Harrington seemed to find it funny, asking if all had had their fill. He clapped me on the back telling me not to look so concerned. Said he wouldn’t tell Lizzie. I was in a confusion for a while after that, I felt strangely frit and kept washing my itchy privates. I hurried up to Ellacombe as soon as I could and blurted out to Katie that we should get engaged. Well, it made her happy. And we went out and about a little more. I never got her a ring. It seemed to settle me for a while also. We used to walk on the beach near Watcombe, and I’d moan that the crows hopped on the sand after us just like my bad reputation followed me everywhere. Katie used to say that the difference was that now I had her on my side.
Shanty
I’ve looked up this ‘Hog Eye’ business. Apparently it’s a sea shanty, sung by oldtime sailors when they pulled on the rigging and wound their ropes. A shanty is like a work chant. They say the name come from the French ‘chanter’ to sing. There is a whole load of versions of that particular Hog Eye song. Some of the words are not so complimentary to the bros. Let’s say you wouldn’t want to be singing it down the hood. There are some who think that a ‘hog eye’ is some type of barge but I pretty much think that the idea of it meaning female private parts is the right one. The song is all about the bad things guys do to a girl called Sally. No wonder it made Lizzie laugh to hear it. It’s got some cool verses and I found myself singing them while out driving or murmuring them as I went down the aisles at the local deli. My favorite stanza goes “Sally’s in the kitchen punchin’ duff, the cheeks of her arse go chuff, chuff, chuff. Chicken in the bread pan pickin’ out dough, Sally will your dog bite? No child, No. Daddy cut his biter off a long time ago.” There’s something a bit scary about the words, ain’t there? They are songs for hard men. There is something about the shanty’s crudeness that has lifted me up a little. I’ve gotten to be too sensitive, I reckon my sensibility has been dragging me down.
There are many other shanties. The one I like best is ‘Lowlands”. It has all the economy and passion of a fine poem. It’
s all about dreaming of a departed lover then realizing they were dead. There are a lot of revenants and returning dead in shanties. I’ve found it pays to look at the seafaring songs closely if you are picking about at the life and doings of Mister John Lee. There is one strange one called “Hanging Johnny” which riffs on different ways to hang people. It has sinister jokey lines like “They calls me Hanging Johnny, Well I’d hang the Holy Family, ’cause hanging is so funny.” I wondered whether John’s shipmates on The Implacable used to kid him about it. I somehow got the idea of having the Hanging Johnny tune sent to my cell as a ring tone. You can see I’m real dedicated to research. Not that anyone ever much rings me, it’s mainly cold callers and finance companies.
Lee’s world is keeping me busy but the sad stuff still leaks back in time. Nights are the worse. Lying there with the TV off, hearing the rumble of the big rigs out on Highway 12. My rooms seem to shuffle around with muffled noises. I keep turning the light back on but there’s nothing there. I spend the days filling myself up with nootropics I’ve bought off the Net to try and help me function better but they make my head race at night. All that Gaba, Citicoline and enhanced Vitamin B12 swirling about. I guess for a lot of folks you can measure how well your brain is doing by comparing yourself to brothers and sisters and to parents. Now that Grandpa’s gone I’ve got no- one against whom to measure how screwed up I really am.