by Mark Slouka
ACCLAIM FOR MARK SLOUKA AND
GOD’S FOOL
“Few books in recent memory have offered as much in terms of fully-formed characters, and fewer authors share Slouka’s gift to render the extraordinary in ordinary terms without sacrificing its potency.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A gifted stylist.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A poetic rumination on love and family.… We are constantly moved to tears by Slouka’s spare and heart-breaking novel.”
—Anniston Star
“Exceptional … fascinating … powerful.”
—Library Journal
Mark Slouka
GOD’S FOOL
Mark Slouka’s story “The Woodcarver’s Tale” won a National Magazine Award in Fiction for Harper’s in 1995. He is a graduate of Columbia University, and he has taught at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego. He currently teaches at Columbia and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
BOOKS BY MARK SLOUKA
Lost Lake
God’s Fool
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Mark Slouka
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopfedition as follows:
Slouka, Mark.
God’s fool / Mark Slouka.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78975-4
1. Bunker, Chang, 1811–1874—Fiction. 2. Bunker, Eng, 1811–1874—Fiction.
3. North Carolina—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction.
4. Rural families—Fiction. 5. Married people—Fiction. 6. Siamese twins—Fiction.
7. Freak shows—Fiction. 8. Farm life—Fiction. 9. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.L697 G63 2002
813′.54—dc21 2001053975
www.vintagebooks.com.
v3.1
For my wife, Leslie, and our children, Zack and Maya,
who make this world all a man could want,
my parents, Olga and Zdenek,
who know about the ties that bind,
and for Sacvan Bercovitch,
who introduced me to America.
Into the air, as breath into
the wind. Would they had stay’d.
—William Shakespeare
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks—yet again—to Sloan Harris, Jordan Pavlin, and Colin Harrison, exhorter extraordinaire, my students and colleagues at the Columbia University Writing Division, for providing encouragement or commiseration as needed, and the National Endowment for the Arts, for shrinking the bills.
I am indebted, however, not only to friends and governmental agencies, but to certain books as well, particularly Lawrence Weschler’s Dr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders, which sharpened my sense of the nineteenth century’s appetite for “curiosities,” and Henry Mayhew’s magisterial London Labour and the London Poor, which made the costermongers’ stalls along Petticoat-lane as vivid and familiar to me as anything on Broadway.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Part Two
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Part Three
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Part Four
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
PART ONE
I.
In a vertical world, a world of men like pines, or posts, more separate than they know, we were born with a bridge. A small, fleshy bridge, a hand span long and half as thick (thick enough for a boy to march his soldiers across if he watched their steps and they kept in file), forever connecting our two principalities like an act of God, the will of the citizens to hate one another be damned. If a life were measured by the number of metaphors it gives occasion to, the opportunities it presents to journalistic hacks and carnival barkers, ours has been rich indeed; in the field of grammar alone we have been wealthy beyond measure, a veritable primer made flesh. We were the hyphenated twins, as that nice young man writing for La Quotidienne once put it. We were a living conjunction, an if or an and or a but where a full stop would have been both correct and kind. We were separate sentences spliced with a comma, an error come alive. I could go on.
The day we were born, the midwives ran from our monstrous birth, leaving our mother to cut her own cord, untwist and bathe us. Twenty years later, the citizens of two continents came running to stare. I despised them about equally. I never changed. I see this now as my essential trait: Pushed to the wall by man or God, I pushed back. If the world showed its teeth, I rubbed it against the fur. I was born that way, and if I were to live to be as old as Methuselah, I’d be that way still.
Little Charlie Stratton, who could stand in a teacup, once preached me a sermon on Christian acceptance. “We must accept our fate with humility and gra-titude,” he hectored me in that mad-duck voice of his, and I remember being tempted to add, “and milk it like an udder until it runs dry,” but didn’t, distracted, I suppose, by the furious little digit he poked at my stomach with each stressed syllable (ac-cept our fate with hu-mi-lity and gratitude), like a schoolteacher trapped in a child’s dream. Oh, but how he made us cringe, Barnum’s “little brick,” posing and primping for councillors and queens: now Romulus bravely attacking a vase, now Cain with a club the size of a quill, now Crusoe in furs like a shipwrecked squirrel. But we were separate cases, Charlie and I. Humility is prudent when you’re the size of a hat.
Acceptance was not in my nature. Even as a young man it seemed to me that everywhere the world conspired against the heart, and though I knew the heart would lose, I couldn’t bear to call it right. It seemed unjust to me that those we had come to know should have to leave us, that the mowers resting in the shade had to rise, that perfection passed. Gideon liked to claim that my melancholy grew the more I watered it, but it wasn’t the wine that made the passing of things so hard for me, just as it isn’t the port by my side that makes me miss him now. No, like God, I had a jealous nat
ure. I would have kept him here, you see. Drawn a circle around him, as I would around all the ones I’ve known and loved. And some besides. And in that circle, their heads thrown back through a warm ray of sun (the mark of my benediction), the mowers could laugh forever, one leg up and one leg out as the handles of their tools slowly moldered to dust and the blades of their scythes sank down in the grass. But the circle didn’t hold. I couldn’t hold it. Except once, maybe.
Before the attack on Cemetery Ridge, they say, Pickett’s men waited in the woods by the edge of the open fields, watching the milkweed drifting in the air like a lost squall. They knew. Every man and boy among them. Some scribbled quick notes against the stocks of their rifles or their brothers’ backs or the stones of the old mossed walls that ran through those woods like a stitch through a quilt, marking borders long forgotten—“To Miss Masie,” “To My Father,” “In Case of My Death”—then pinned them to their shirts. Most just sat with their backs against the trees, their caps hung lightly on their bayonets, waiting.
No one spoke. A bee buzzed on a turtlehead blooming in the damp, climbed up the tongue. A hot blade of sun lit the moss on a boulder, cut the toes off a boot. Here and there men lay sprawled on the previous season’s leaves, staring up through the layered branches as if into the milky eye of heaven itself. Further off, where an old road cut light through the roof of leaves, a photographer in a black vest and a wide-brimmed hat went about his business, hurrying back and forth from a small, square wagon.
Suddenly a canteen went over with a clank; a cut leaf twirled slowly to the ground. Like sleepers waking, they raised their heads. A private’s hat flew from a branch. They leaped to their feet. The floor of the forest, an overgrown orchard, was stippled with apples, small and hard as hickory nuts. Within seconds the shade was alive with joyful, savage shouting. Men sprinted for the breastworks of pasture walls and broken trees, one hand holding their caps to their heads, the other cradling their bulging shirts, lumpy with ammunition. Some said afterward that a strange sort of dream seemed to come over that glade. For a short space of time, they one and all seemed to forget where they were. The wavering heat, the ridge, the order—soon to come—to advance across the open fields (an order Longstreet himself would have to give with a nod, unable to bring himself to speak): All these faded away like distance on a summer afternoon, and they played. As children will play. As though death were a story to scare them to bed, and scarce worth believing.
And I ask you: What manner of God would stop them? Would bring down his foot? Would turn them, laughing, to blood and bone?
I see Christopher there, my little boy grown tall and lean, his wrists protruding a full three inches from the sleeves. I can feel his thrill at a solid hit, the sting of a little green ball in his side. I’ve imagined myself there so often now that my imagining has taken on the color of memory. You say this is wrong? Who was it, I want to know, who first divided history from dream, who ran his finger down the ranges of the past and decreed a frontier where none had been? When was the treaty that gave us this damnable map, and who gave it authority? No, I’ll say it once and be done with it: There is no frontier, in this world or any other, that love or desire or pain can’t cross.
II.
He’s asleep, the old fool, his face pressed into the crimson pillow, his hands hanging between his knees. How he grumbled and spit when I woke him, sitting on the edge of the bed like a big gray child, fumbling with his buttons, grousing at the cold. The fire started quickly. We have a good store of applewood left from the fall. He asked if it was the pain again. I lied. I’ll not go traipsing about the country of a night like this. The sound of the ice comes in from the dark; the dogs’ bones have welded themselves to the dirt. As though the Yankees, having imposed their will on us, now felt free to impose their weather as well.
Gideon could tell me what it is that clenches my heart like a tomato in a vise. With Gideon dead I’ll as soon stay where I am and trust to fate, though looking at my brother sleeping next to me, his white-whiskered face an inch from my shoulder, his nose abloom with tiny red roads, I wonder at my faith. Perhaps like an old dog I prefer the familiar kick to the unfamiliar smile, the uncertainty of a new allegiance.
Restless, restless, my head full of whisperings I can’t make out. Waking into the dark tonight, still half in my dreams, I heard the creak and boom of doors closing deep in the core of things. The lake, adjusting itself. Breaking to the wheel. Or, like me, resisting that accommodation.
He twitches his paws in his sleep, then shifts with the cold. I adjust the blanket, drawing it up around our shoulders.
III.
In the summer of 1856 the road to Kernville was little more than a dirt track, soft as talcum, and when the last rain came it raised puffs of dust like bullets all along the way. Dark little circles appeared on the wagon, the harness, the children’s feet. And then stopped. The dust joined the layers already whitening the roadside brambles wagon-high and wagon-deep like blight, and stayed. We clung to the things we knew—the smell of rain, the splintered helve, the weight of slops or stone—but even these, it seemed, struggled to escape us. Nothing came easy. The corn was slow that year, barely knee-high by August.
And yet I think back on that time fondly. We all still lived in the house at Mount Airy then, Addy and Sallie making out as best they could, the children always underfoot. Christopher was barely eleven, seemingly convinced the world had gone deaf, forever climbing, like a cricket in a jar, to the top of anything handy. Josephine and Catherine were ten and inseparable. Natural mothers to man and beast, quick with the salve and the sticking plaster, they spent their days nursing what the dogs didn’t kill—mainly three-legged tortoises with stars on their shells—in the hospital hard by the chicken coop. My Nannie, marshaling the younger ones—James and Susan, Patrick and Victoria—would arrange funeral services for those who succumbed to her sisters’ ministrations, as well as for the parade of cat-killed moles and newborn possums left each night like vestal offerings on the doorstep or the parlor rug.
By the time we awoke, the procession would be winding its way through the locust trees and past the sheds to the bald spot by the garden. There the deceased would be laid to rest with appropriate solemnity (unless one of the dogs happened to make off with him, which would change the spirit of the proceedings considerably) under a cross of twigs tied together with twine. Everyone had a role. James would always dig, I remember; Susan would cover; Patrick or Victoria would drop the sweaty little handfuls of violets or phlox. And saddened but virtuous, they’d make their way home. What sweet days those were. I’ve never had tomatoes like the ones that grew there, trellising themselves on the children’s crosses, bearing them down with the weight of their fruit.
Hindsight is the Almighty’s compensation for brittle bones and shattered sleep. We grow crisp and crotchety, fully half our organs ignore our commands—whistling to themselves, as it were, while we struggle to bring them to attention—but to balance the ledger we are allowed to dwell on the past, revisit the sites of our old humiliations, reread (without the aid of spectacles) our own misjudgments. And we do, believing that it was there, in our past, that our last best chance for happiness lay hidden; that somewhere in that thicket, now dense with self-recrimination and foolishness, trickled a freshet of joy powerful enough to redeem us.
It’s been fifty-eight years since Chee-kou died, but I can still feel the warmth of the feathers in the hollow of her back, see the place on the bank of the Meklong where we taught her to hop on one leg and quack for food and walk across a wire—her wings out like a tightrope walker—straight into my arms. Sitting here I can see the saplings to which we tied the wire. I can smell the mud, the fish rotting in the roots, feel the sun like a fevered hand resting on the back of our necks. And there!—like a quick stab, so sudden, so unutterably familiar—our mother’s voice, calling us back to the boat and home. I can see her glance up from her work—Where are they?—unaware that her boys are doddering old men sittin
g before a fire a lifetime away, who, dreaming their old men’s dreams, suddenly hear her calling their names.
IV.
We’d had no rain to speak of since May that year. The livestock barely moved, the flies were unbearable. My brother was untroubled. Divine dispensation, he said, looking at the rows of bolted lettuce in the garden. I could hardly argue. The Lord in His Whimsy had apparently decided to cook us all, sinners and saved alike.
Our morning sessions on the porch had begun by then, and twice a week and once on Sundays we would repair outside, my brother to study the wisdom of God, I to contemplate the many roads to damnation, as he so neatly put it. There was little help for it. I can still see us there, like clerks behind the old dining-room table, he quietly mumbling his way through Deuteronomy, I trying to calculate approximately how long it might take him, having pushed off from Egypt, so to speak, to reach the land of Canaan. In the first hour he turned the page once, I swear, then turned it back, apparently having missed something. Eventually Aunt Grace would waddle out and ask if there was anything we’d be wanting. “Deliverance,” I would say. My brother would say nothing, secure in my torment.
A summer of nights, as I remember it now. Everything that happened that season seemed to happen between dusk and dawn. Our slaves, laboring under the overseer’s less-than-vigilant eye, topped and suckered the tobacco at dawn, scraped the rows by lantern light. On Sunday nights we would allow them to go down to the sandy little beach that used to lie just below the bluff before the floods erased it in ’62. Even on the darkest nights you could see it from the rise—a wide, sharp tooth, floating in the dark. The women would lay out the food on the bank (you could see the watermelons like a clutch of great, dark eggs, cooling in the mud), then wade slowly into the current with the smaller children on their hips, their dresses momentarily blossoming around them, then trailing off downstream. They walked with a slow, pushing motion, their arms swinging in a loose arc as if sowing the river with the cornbread or honey cake they offered now and again to the babes on their sides. If you watched from the trees, as Eng and I did, early on, you would suddenly notice one of the older men standing waist-deep and still, a seam opening in the river just below his hips, staring off toward the opposite shore. Lost in the shadows, holding his hat to his chest like a supplicant, he would look just like an old, half-flooded stump, only the smear of pipe smoke lifting away from the current giving him away.