“So?” said Henry Fox, and Pooch said yowrFROWR!
Daniel said that he just wanted to tell him how much he liked that song and how much he admired the words, and that he had heard Fox’s name mentioned several times by different people, and just thought he’d like to meet Fox and tell him how much he had admired that song and that he had heard his named mentioned by different people several times.
“So?” said Henry Fox, and Pooch said yowrFROWR!
Well, Daniel said it had been nice meeting him and he was sorry if he had bothered him or interrupted him or anything and that if Fox ever happened to pass the school he ought to drop in and say hello or something, and anyway he was pleased to have met him.
“I never visit the school,” said Fox, “or the village,” and Pooch backed him up on this.
Well, said Daniel, that was too bad, and he was sorry to hear that, but that he figured he must have his reasons, and that Daniel didn’t want to give the impression of butting in or being nosey or anything and anyway he was pleased to have met him, and goodbye, pleasant day to you, goodbye. Daniel backed off from the dog and then turned and walked off.
Behind his back he heard Pooch say yowr and Fox say, “Wait” and Pooch say FROWR and Fox say, “Hold it.”
Daniel turned.
Fox said, “You didn’t tell me your name.”
Daniel told him his name.
“How old are you?” Fox asked.
Daniel told him that he was only seventeen, and said he hoped Fox wouldn’t tell anybody that, because if he did, it might cost him his job because schoolmasters are supposed to be at least eighteen and besides Daniel hadn’t even finished school himself, so he hoped, he said again, that Fox wouldn’t tell anybody.
Fox said, “You could pass for considerably more than seventeen,” and then he asked, “What was it you said you came all the way up here to see me about?”
Daniel said that he had just heard Fox’s name mentioned several times by different people and just thought he’d like to meet Fox and tell him how much he had admired that school song.
“Thank you,” Fox said, and permitted himself a small chuckle. “I’m rather proud of that song, myself.” Then he said, “Sit,” and gestured toward a tree-stump chopping block. Pooch hopped on the block and sat. “Not you, you dorg,” Fox said to the dog, and kicked it off.
Daniel sat on the chopping block and Fox squatted on his heels beside him. Fox didn’t say anything more, and Daniel tried to think of something to say or to ask him, without seeming nosey. Nearly ten minutes went by, in silence, before Daniel thought up something, which was to ask Fox why he had written that song.
“You should have heard the one they had before,” was all Fox said.
Another ten minutes drifted by, Daniel swallowed and asked Fox if he really enjoyed living by himself all alone.
“Well, there’s Pooch there,” Fox said.
Ten minutes later Daniel asked him if he knew many of the people in Five Corners.
“Know them all,” Fox said.
Another ten minutes and Daniel asked him what he thought of Judge Braddock.
“Perfidious,” said Henry Fox, and then the interview sort of petered out. Daniel Lyam Montross did not know what “perfidious” meant, but he made a mental note of it, and as soon as he got back to the schoolhouse he looked it up in his dictionary. This was but the first time that Daniel would have to consult his dictionary regarding a word used by Henry Fox; there would be many and many more such occasions; eventually Daniel would even take the dictionary with him when he went to visit Fox. For although Henry Fox’s casual speech was sparing of words, and those words usually Vermontish with just a trace of a foreign accent (or an amalgam of several different foreign accents), as Daniel got to know him the man revealed ever greater depths of diction and sententious wisdom. Within six months Daniel’s dictionary was worn out, falling loose from its spine. But by that time Daniel knew almost all the words that Fox would use. He knew what “plebeian” meant in relation to Jake Claghorn. He knew why Aaron Tindall was “bibulous” and what connotation “secular” had for Matthew Earle. He understood Fox’s coinages: how he could take the name of a Frenchman named de Sade and make it into a word, “sadist,” to describe the mean simpleton Marshall Allen, who disrupted the school and pulled wings off of flies. He understood how both Joel McLowery and the weather could be “inclement.” And he collected a whole wardrobe of dressy last words for Rachel McLowery: “nubile,” “rufescent,” “sirenic,” “muliebrile,” “hoydenish,” “artless,” “orificial,” etc.
Daniel liked to tease Rachel with his newfound locution. He would call her a “gamic gamine” and she would pout and pester him to tell her what that meant, and she would refuse to have anything further to do with him unless he told her what it meant, and finally in the end he would explain that gamine is a kind of tomboyish girl with elfin appeal, and gamic means sexual, and she would laugh and mock-slap his face and love him all the more because he was so smart and knew such fancy magic words. She knew that he went often to see Henry Fox, in winter on a pair of snowshoes he spent all of his first salary on, but she did not know that Fox was the source of his rhetoric. Nor did she suspect that Fox was the reason that Daniel suddenly seemed to know the answers to all the riddles of life and sex which had eluded him before. He was able to fill in for her the gaps gaping in the hygiene book. She was comforted by his explanation of why human females have their menses. She learned that the manufacture of a baby, although commenced in an instant of abandon, is a nine-month-long toil ending in agony, and she decided it was just as well that that pedlar hadn’t given her a child, it was just as well that she was emotionally unable to permit a picket to enter her velvet, it was just as well that, as Daniel assured her, it is impossible for male sirup to reach the womb via the stomach. Henry Fox told him this. With chalk on a piece of slate, Henry Fox diagrammed the female esophagus, stomach and intestines, and demonstrated how they are discrete from the ovaries, oviducts and uterus. Then, to “normalize” or at least define Rachel’s misconception about fusing, to clarify such orality, Henry Fox told him a new word derived from the Latin past participle of fellare. Daniel didn’t like the new word because it rhymed with “ratio,” which for some reason (probably related to his distaste for mathematics) he couldn’t stand the sound of. So Daniel coined his own substitute, near enough in sound as well as meaning: felicity, and Henry Fox agreed that this was a splendid byword for it.
Daniel Lyam Montross was slightly bothered by the fact that, although Rachel would perform felicity on him whenever it suited her whim or his, he was not able to take her to the dances on the rubber-ball-mounted floor of Glen House, because somehow it wouldn’t look proper for the young schoolmaster to be seen escorting one of his scholars to the village dance. Rachel went to the dances regularly (as did every single soul in Five Corners…except Henry Fox) but was always required to choose, as her partner in the squares or reels of the contra-dances, a boy other than Daniel, while Daniel had to be content with swinging and sashaying old and middle-aged ladies, the youngest of whom was Rachel’s mother, Melissa, a somewhat heavy substitute for the daughter, although Melissa McLowery had the same wondrous It as her daughter (“It” being one of Henry Fox’s more sophisticated syncopes, syncope being one of Henry Fox’s more sophisticated cuttingwords, cuttingword being one of Henry Fox’s more sophisticated synthetic copulations, synthetic copulation being one of my own less sophisticated attempts to deal with Fox’s terminology, synthetic in the sense of both “hybridizing” and “artificial, man-made,” and copulation in the sense of both “linking” and, since Henry had no women to screw, he screwed words, like cuttingword derived from the fact that syncope comes from the Latin for “cut,” and means, in relation to It, that It is a cut or shortened form of a longer word, namely, Identity—more about this later). Melissa McLowery had a real yen for Daniel Lyam Montross (Henry Fox explaining that yen comes from the Chinese yin which means both “a
ddiction” and the moon, shade, femininity, or the passive female cosmic element complementary to yang) but Daniel didn’t have much of a yang for Melissa; for one thing she was his girl’s mother, and for another thing she was a little bit overweight, although the excess fat had accumulated mostly in pleasant female places like her breasts and thighs and mouth. At the dances, and elsewhere, Melissa always seemed to be trying to get Daniel off some other place, or at least making feints in that direction. She was still this side of forty, but her hair was not red like her daughter’s, rather more on the auburn side. She loved to dance, and did the contra-dances with great vivacity and flourishes, and taught Daniel all he ever learned about dancing, hopping and skipping on the bouncy floor mounted on rubber balls, he looking over her shoulder to see whose partner Rachel was, and always wishing it was him but knowing it could never be, unless he quit being schoolmaster, which he often contemplated quitting being, especially as harsh, inclement winter dragged on, and his perch at the front of the schoolroom too far from the stove to keep from freezing, and his stomach not lined with enough nourishment to warm him until the noon hour and Rachel’s fine lunches, and the education he was getting from Henry Fox making him have a yang for better things than schoolteaching.
What happened was, Melissa McLowery, who had developed such a moony addiction for the sun of Daniel, and who had no inkling that her daughter had been carrying on, after a fashion, with him for quite some time now, espied them at it. Lots of mothers undoubtedly have stumbled by accident upon their daughters petting or even screwing on the living room sofa after a date, or something like that, but how many mothers have gone into a schoolhouse and discovered their daughters squatting in front of the teacher’s open fly? Melissa McLowery probably had an urge to flog them both on the spot, but she tiptoed out, unseen, and Daniel didn’t know he had been seen until several days later, when he was invited to “call” upon Mrs. McLowery at her house, for “tea and talk.” Even so, Daniel figured she just wanted to talk about Rachel’s progress in school, or something, and he went to her house equipped with a standard “certificate,” his ink on it still wet: “This certifies that Rachel McLowery during the past week has been punctual at school, commendable in deportment and perfect in recitations.”
Now Melissa, even though she was only a sheepfarmer’s wife, fancied herself one of the better bred ladies of Five Corners—as a matter of fact, it was for this very reason that she invited him to tea instead of sending for the town constable or reporting him to Judge Braddock or to her husband. She even served tea in the parlor, that room which Vermonters so seldom use, usually only for funerals or weddings, the room in her case filled with furniture hardly touched, let alone worn, and of, for the most part, the latest mode, bought from mail-order houses: carved and decorated china closet, French marquetry parlor table, dainty golden oak ladies’ writing desk, imitation mahogany pier mirror, a deep-tufted Roman divan couch (upon which Melissa sat), a matching Roman reception chair (upon which Daniel sat), the walls hung with colored photographs of rustic scenes and artographs of same, in gilt ornamented frames, the four corners of the room with whatnot shelves and their varied contents, echoing the centerpiece étagère with its four shelves covered with rare, curious bric-a-brac of colored glass, smoked glass, porcelain, and silver. As far as Five Corners went—and Five Corners didn’t go very far—it was one of the nicest parlors in town.
Here, if you can take it (Daniel scarcely could), is Melissa:
Sweetening for your tea? Long or short? And try one of these cakes, you’ll like it, fresh baked this morning myself, I doubt if Jake Claghorn ever bakes, does he, tee hee. Now here I go making light of what’s a tragedy, you getting stuck with Jake and all. Dunno as ya knew it, but I was mad as hops that Joel wouldn’t underbid him. Was ya paying mind, you probably noticed that Joel near ’baout got ya, he went all the way down to a hundred and twenty-five, he did, and he’d’ve gone even lower if I’d had my say, but he wouldn’t listen to me, a hundred and twenty-five was the lowest he’d go, even though I begged and pleaded and even told him I’d make up the difference out a my pin money. Joel’s so tightfisted, he is. Why, one time Sophronica Earle borrowed a couple dozen eggs from him, and told him she’d return him some eggs soon as her biddies got to layin, but Joel says, “It’ll be better t’pay me cash fer ’em. No tellin but the price might go down by the time you come to return ’em.” Just goes to show.
But I’ll let ya in on a little secret, young man. And that is this: Who do ya think has been fixin those lunches fer ya? Rachel? Oh, ’scuse me, I have to laugh. Soon’s school started up, I told Rachel to keep a eye out and see whut ya was eatin fer lunch. Then of a morning I’d get up and when I went to fix Rachel’s lunch, I’d fix two a everything, but stuff it all in together so’s Joel wouldn’t ever notice. Weren’t fer me, y’ud be all skin and bones.
Looks like yu’ve kind a bit the hand that fed ya. Never did I dream that y’ud fall fer Rachel on account a them lunches, or else I’d’ve gave her instructions to tell you that it was her own mother and not her who fixed ’em. And her not but sixteen. And you the schoolmaster. What’ve ya got to say fer yourself, young man?
Wal, cough and stammer all ya like, I know whut yu’ve been up ta. No, Rachel’s not let out a peep ’baout it. You think she would? You can’t beat the tongue loose from her head. But I found out anyhow. That gull’s been in hot water before, and I don’t plan to see her in it again. Not with any schoolteacher, anyhow. Oh, how well I do remember when me and Sophronica were school chums, and what a beauty she was and could’ve married a governor or a senator if she liked, but she fell fer the schoolmaster, who was Matthew Earle, and he swept her off her feet, and now look at her. He’s worse’n Joel, most ways.
My lands, dunno jest whut I want t’say t’ya, young man. But ya orter know I come to the academy th’other day to invite ya t’call fer tea, and when I opened the door I saw whut my poor eyes can’t yet believe, and I closed the door and came home and wet up five or six handkerchiefs ’fore I could stop. Fer all I know, or fer all she’d ever tell me, that sweet little gull’s not yet been deflowered, ’less ya want t’count the flower of her rosey lips, tee hee. Aint I awful, laughin this way when I feel like screechin and tearin out my hair.
Wonder. Ofttimes wonder, last couple a days, and many’s the time then, wonder whut a picket ’twixt the lips would feel like. If ya dislike my brash words, I don’t keer, there’s no way else t’say it ’cept for prissy mincing. Yer big thing between her pretty little jaws. Where it don’t belong. Aint ya afraid she might could get absentminded and bite it off? tee hee, oh my soul an body listen t’me laughin when I orter squall.
Wouldn’t undertake to turn ya in, like ya desarve. Wouldn’t undertake to mention it to the Judge. Wouldn’t even undertake to let on a word to Joel ’baout it. Wouldn’t even undertak t’say to Rachel whut I seen. Jest me’n you’s the only ones that know. Jest me’n you. And whut’ve ya got t’say fer yourself? Nothing. Too shamed t’open yer mouth, I bet.
So whut d’ye think I orter do? Keep Rachel out a school? Lock her up? Try an get her to promise not never to open her mouth again? Ha. Oh, my.
If I had the sense God gave to a chipmunk, I’d up and get Joel’s gun and shoot ya. But I aint. So stop yer pantin. I’ve thought and I’ve thought. Aint able to get my mind orf it. It’s drivin me mental.
Whut I wonder. Whut I wonder is, if you’re so hipped on that pertic’lar fancy, if you’re so pickin pertic’lar ’baout gettin yer sirup tapped in such a fashion, why’nt ya use a growed woman ’stead of a innocent young gull?
Young man, you’ve got me to wonderin awful whut a picket ’twixt the lips would feel like. And I mean to find out. And you aint got a ghost of a choice, neither. Yer only choice is fer Judge Braddock to lynch ya, or fer Joel t’thrash ya dead. Or mebbe even fer me t’shoot ya.
Want to pick one a them choices? Then nobody’s t’know but you’n me. So latch that door yender, boy, and come here to Meliss
a.
If Melissa McLowery, in her blackmail-seduction of Daniel Lyam Montross, had only been curious to see what the act of felicity is like, she would not have been disappointed, but as it turned out, she was not willing to stop there; felicity was only, you might say, an entrée. She wanted to do everything, and, as long as she was able to coerce him with the threat of punishment for his moral turpitude with Rachel, he did her bidding. Not long after that occasion when she first felicitated him, she requested, and received, that awful experience which Henry Fox, noting Daniel’s failure to nickname it suitably, was to coin conic licorice, the first part referring both to the shape and movements of the tongue, the second part to the taste. Henry Fox was the only person Daniel ever told about Melissa McLowery. Henry Fox told Daniel that he had long known of Melissa’s yen for sexual adventures (he didn’t tell Daniel, then, that he himself had been her lover sixteen years before). Fox’s advice was that if Daniel didn’t mind it, and did not feel he was being “kept” by her, then tant mieux—a French expression meaning, said Fox, don’t stare a gift horse in the mouth.
Winter, with its five-foot snows and fifteen-foot drifts, usually isolated the inhabitants of Five Corners, from each other as well as from the outside world. There were people back in the hills who would not be seen again until the first March or April thaw, although their children managed to get to school, on foot or snowshoes or barrel-stave skis. The grown-ups seemed to enter into a kind of hibernation: a minimum of each day devoted to the chores of the barn and house, the rest of the day in a kind of tuned-out lethargy. There were people, especially among the older generations, who could sit in a chair by the stove for ten or twelve hours, fully awake, without doing anything at all except getting up to eat or go to the privy. But not Daniel. In fact, the helpless idleness and isolation of the Five Corners populace made his own activities seem all the more lively. He never stayed indoors at Jake Claghorn’s except when he was sleeping, and sometimes he would be invited to spend the night at Henry Fox’s Gold Brook Chateau and would arise early to get back in time for school. When he wasn’t visiting Henry Fox or exploring the white countryside on his snowshoes or out setting traps for game, he would be meeting Rachel at the schoolhouse or Melissa in her parlor. There was no need to wait until Joel McLowery went out to tend his flocks of sheep; Joel never under any circumstances entered Melissa’s parlor, and besides that he was rather hard of hearing. And only once did Rachel discover Daniel sitting in the parlor, and then he told her that her mother had invited him to discuss Rachel’s progress in school. But sometimes Melissa would be restless or impatient, and would go to the schoolhouse after hours. Occasionally Rachel on her way home would meet her mother on the way to the schoolhouse, and her mother would say she was going to visit somebody at Glen House.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 52