Chambers says: Your hired man. Amos.
* * *
IV.
Stutley (Junior, as it were)’s childhood in the New Jerusalem, between the shores of Keuka and Seneca Lakes in central New York, doted on as one of the few children in a community of separatist celibates, all of them half-drunk on godliness, was at least as happy as any other childhood and happier than many. The Universall Friend forbade violence of any kind, even so trivial a violence as striking a willful child. She believed, instead, in reason and patience. Stutley, grown a young man, left to study at Brown College, back in Rhode Island, where he could live with relatives; but when at last he had finished there, all diploma’d, he learned one more wisdom: his hometown, riven by land speculation and unable to long outlast its founder, had been liquidated in that universal solvent, suits-at-law.
Therefore he’d ventured westward, out into what was still only sparsely settled wilderness, on the promise that there was need for schoolmasters there. Not that anyone called it wilderness. It was opportunity!, that most American of words, and like most of America, newer than new, it was not quite what it seemed.
Not that it was a lie, exactly, either. There ought to have been a need for schools, Heaven knows they sorely needed them for the adults as for the children, but schools there were none. Not a one. Certainly in Rhode Island and Connecticut there were more would-be schoolmasters than there were schools to house ‘em. So then, young man, westward ho! and they’ll beat a path to your door.
Paths there were, in plenty, trails and tracks, but hardly any roads, no schools, and certainly no students at all. Thus all his opportunity left him, as his ready cash already had, on the marshy margin of French Creek at Greenfield Post Office, better known as Little Hope, the last stop for the flat-bottom boats (or batteaux as they are called locally) that ply the western branch of that stream. Another crate landed, crack!, at his feet, heaved off the batteau by a boatman who was going to be angrier yet when he learned that the gratuity due him was not to be. Stutley sighed and tugged the crate out of the mud. Well then, he supposed, there he was, and there he would stay.
* * *
V.
I begged him! I begged him to stay, I did.
This outburst startles Chambers, who is head-down at the oars again. He leans back, so that the blades lift clear of the water, dripping, and with a clatter lets them fall to the bottom boards. He turns on his bench, hefting his legs over it, to face Northup on the bow bench, and plants his feet on the bottom. He pats his pockets for his tobacco pouch—but he’s left it at home, knowing that smoking would be unwelcome at Northup’s place. The American shore is a blue blur low on the horizon.
Reluctant to speak after the fury his attempt at a few sympathetic words provoked earlier, Chambers leaves Northrup to his fit of weeping and takes in the cloud- and lakescape. He was one of Northup’s early and few students—the little schoolroom didn’t last long—and owes to his relentless drilling what smattering of Greek and Latin he still retains; he can’t imagine Northup begging anyone for anything. Or weeping, for that matter. The little boat bobs and rocks now as the wind-raised chop slaps against its side, the tops of the wavelets flaked with dazzling sunlight.
Have to be an inquest, I reckon, Northup says, calmer.
Chambers nods.
When?
Tuesday instant.
Tuesdays I take my milk to the Burnham factory, in Arkwright.
It takes a little time to gather a jury together.
Northup rubs his face with both hands, lets them fall back onto his knees, open, palms up. He shakes his head again, as if in disbelief. He stares at his fingers, curled like the roots of a storm-felled tree.
Well, he says at last. Better get to what we come here for.
He bends from his seat, hefts his walking stick, and pushes it through the gap of a crude wood clamp fixed to the bow, letting it slip through his hands until most of the stick’s length is underwater. He twists the clamp tight.
He turns to Chambers and says, I warned—
Chambers says: Perhaps we could just get on with it.
Northup turns back and picks up a mallet. He strikes the submerged stick; Chambers can feel the thrum of its vibration through his seat. Another blow. Another. He is making a steady rhythm like a man walking, ten strokes in all. Northup waits for a moment, then repeats the pattern. And once more. He tosses the mallet down and turns to face Chambers.
Right then, he says. Might take a while.
Chambers puts his hands in his pockets. The wind off the water is cold. The ice finally cleared up only a week ago.
Unexpectedly, Northup smiles. Never told you about the Dark Day, did I?
Chambers shakes his head.
Northup tells him:
Five days after my father met the Universall Friend. A crowd, listening, in the middle of the deserted street, in the middle of the day. Everywhere the darkness. Candles flickering in the windows of shops and houses. A preacher, voice already hoarse. He holds a book open, aloft. Shouts: Matthew, chapter twenty-four, and the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven! He’s not reading aloud, it’s too dark. An eloquent sweep of his free hand calls attention to the black and heavy sky. Revelation, chapter six, and lo, the sun became black as a sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood and the stars of heaven fell onto the earth, for the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to withstand it! He holds up his free hand, for silence like, and his other hand shakes the book fiercely. Not I! calls someone in the crowd. Nor I! and Amen! amen! from all around. Then there’s a woman’s voice calling out: I shall, I shall stand, we all shall stand that day.
The crowd parts, but there’re also angry murmurs: because it’s Jemima Wilkinson. The preacher admonishes: The wrath of God is upon us all, fear God, for the day of his judgment is here! She says: I worship God the father, not God the petulant child who breaks his playthings in a fit of rage when his will is thwarted. He: Look, the heavens are darkened and the sun snuffed out. She: It is but smoke, can thou not smell it, as from some great fire to the north? She dips a handkerchief into a barrel of water there. Look, it is soot afloat the water, that has settled out of the air, it appears to me that this darkness is occasioned by the smoke and ashes arising from large fires, the state of the wind being such as to prevent the quick dispersion of these heavy vapors. She’s shouted down: Unbeliever! Heathen! Blasphemer! and worse.
Behind her, the preacher lifts his thick book over his head like to strike her. But she looks into his eyes, silently, until he lowers it. She takes it and hugs it to her breast. The crowd’s silent now. She says: The word of God, indeed, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, all things were made by the word of God, and this light shineth in the darkness. She points up at the blackened heavens: What do you think the name of this word is, do you know, can you say? She returns the book (which isn’t in fact a Bible but a volume of Coke’s Institutes) to the preacher. She says: I tell you now, the name of the word is love.
Chambers says: Look!
He’s pointing at the water where a ”-shaped wake is aimed at their boat like an arrow in flight.
* * *
VI.
And Captain DREVAR wrote to the Editor of the Graphic (144):—
“My relatives wrote saying that they would have seen a hundred sea-serpents and never reported it, and a lady also wrote that she pitied any one that was related to any one who had seen the sea-serpent.”
I hope that within a few years, this fear of meeting with a sea-serpent will be no more heard of.
—Antoon Cornelius Oudemans
Shh! Hephyibee hissed. They’ll hear!
Dust motes as they drifted through the air crossed the slits of light that slanted through the vertical chinks in the siding of the empty smokehouse—it was parching summer, Fifth Month of his twelfth year—and, falling through, illuminated then winked out,
shafts and sparks in the dimness. Hephyibee moved so that one bright stripe fell across her bare belly, where she’d hiked up her dress and pushed down her pantalets.
Down, slave! she commanded.
Stutley obediently bent over, his toes gripping the packed-earth floor.
She said, You have seen your mistress improper.
She whisked an old cobweb-chaser, its long bristles limp and broken, against his bare back. He flinched and whimpered, as she’d instructed at the beginning of the game.
Show me your shame, she demanded.
He stood up and dropped his trousers for her.
Ha ha ha, she said—not a real laugh, but as if reading aloud laughter as it would be spelled out in a book. She raised the broom again.
Samuel was standing next to the door, out of the slanted light, watching, blinking, silent. Samuel Turner, youngest boy in a freeman’s family that had joined the settlement from Philadelphia. His dark skin made him little more than an outline against the bright stripes. He’d consented to take off only his shirt. Stutley watched him watching them, Samuel’s mouth open a little, the lower lip moving as he breathed. A fugitive glisten. Stutley saw in his eyes something that must be only a version of himself.
Samuel pushed the door open—blinding glare—and ran away. The door thudded shut. A moment later, the door slammed open and shut again. Hephyibee.
As Stutley stood there, his trousers at his ankles, the smooth dirt cool against his soles, waiting for something, he didn’t know what but something huge and perilous and inexorable—like a theophany from heaven, Hail! Blessed One!— he felt nailed down, not by fear that what he was doing (what was he doing? he didn’t know, not for sure, but he did know it would direct the course of his life) was in any way sinful, for surely it was not, but a certainty that no one, no one, could see its beauty as he did: pure, fervid, glittering, a beauty so overpowering that he was trembling. It was like a long hallway, longer than any real hallway he’d ever seen, stretched out in front of him, lined its whole length with doors, and all he had to do, all he could do, was open one.
* * *
VII.
Northup holds his arm out over the gunwale like Moses preparing to part the waters.
Don’t let the mouth alarm you, he says. Takes some getting used to, I’ll readily admit.
The wake stops a few yards short of the boat, and the leading ripples plash quietly against the side. Then a gout of water bursts up right next to them and out of it thrusts a fleshy column, water runneling down its sides. Like the tail of an enormous snake. The top of it’s more rounded than a snake’s tail, but it’s scaly all over and glistens.
The thing thrashes up and down, like a horse resisting the bridle. Splashes of water fly all over.
It rears back and bulks tall, and a good two feet of it drop over the side of the boat, where it rests, quivering.
Chambers jumps up. The boat rocks.
It all goes so quickly!
Three slits along its sides flare and lapse, flare and lapse, like the gills of a hooked fish. The three slits widen. They flap open. The inside’s bright green. And lined with teeth, rows of teeth, spiraling rows of teeth. And out of the—. It must be a mouth. Out of the mouth a dozen—tongues?—tentacles?—whips?—a dozen little lashes of flesh in as many colors and—
—quite casually—
—as if he’s done it many times before—
—Northup thrusts his hand into the writhing.
He looks up at Chambers, his hand nearly engulfed in a frenzy of caressing whiplets. And he smiles! He holds up the other hand, as if to say, wait, wait, you’ll see.
Two more tentacles emerge from the rings of teeth. Their tips flicker like snake tongues, forked, but fast, much faster, the motion a blur in the air. Dost... fare... well... friend.... sings a piercing little voice like the whine of a mosquito.
Chambers seizes the oar from the bottom of the boat, wrenches it out of its lock, and brings it down with all his strength on the snake looped across the gunwale. The blade skids against solid flesh and he beats it again and again then another oar smacks black against his skull and his eyesight narrows and darkens and he drops the oar. He staggers back. Sky and water swap places and the water blooms green and someone wrenches his arm and tugs him, he’s facedown in the bottom of the boat.
A deep thud from below the boat; the boards (Chambers could swear) strike his jaw like a blow and he sits up like a jack-in-the-box. Water wells up and sinks. Circles of waves with the boat at their center flee outward.
Somewhere deep inside his fury and panic, Chambers hears Northup shouting: Hell’s teeth in a bucket of blood, man! How could you! Why could you! What’s come over you?
Northup grasps Chambers’s lapels and hauls him upright against the bench. He sits down on the other bench and stares at him. Chambers blinks back tears. His belly’s heaving and he swallows hard. He’s panting.
Northup says: For sure your heart is a furtive, terrified, and small one.
And he says: Not to worry, he won’t be returning today.
And he says: I say “he,” but probably it’s nonsense to apply that word to him.
And he says: Always seemed impertinent to ask.
Chambers’s hands are nervously rummaging about, as if they’re someone else’s hands, touching rope, wood, wet, a bucket handle, moss, the oar, a nailhead. Moss?
He looks down. Strewn around him: hundred of wet rounds, like seedpods or ragged coins. He picks one up and immediately flings it down, for it’s warm as flesh and as yielding, its surface plush as velvet.
Ah, Northup says. The eggs, you know.
Chambers levers himself off the bottom and onto the bench.
It’s not done to a purpose, Northup says. He strews his spoor as he goes. Not usually so many, though.
Chambers says: And from these small notions such monsters hatch....
Northup says: Oh, they don’t hatch. Just swell up for a day or two, turn all leathery, crack open, and dry up. Seems this world lacks some vital necessity.
This world? Is there some other?
Northup spreads his open hands, then lets them fall back to his knees.
Chambers’s jaw flaps open: No! You can’t mean—these Hellish creatures—
No just God has any use for a Hell.
He says it with an air of quoting someone irrefutable.
Chambers says: Spare me your heresies. Not Hell, then, but certainly not Heaven. Where then?
Northup waves one hand skywards.
He says, Elsewhere, elsewise. I don’t pretend to understand. I like to think—
He smiles as if at a private joke.
Venus, he says.
Chambers scoffs: Venus! You might as well say Mars. Or Jupiter.
Yes! Northup says with a peculiar enthusiasm. Or the Pole Star!
* * *
VIII.
Northup often spent time on the lake shore, because sometimes he needed to be there, and because he wished to establish that his presence was not unusual. Probably most folks assumed he was smuggling whiskey, and laughed at his pose as an abstemious hemi-demi-semi-quasi-Quaker. He often said: I am myself a burnt-over district.
He picked up a flattish stone and flung it spinning at the water. It smacked the surface and leapt up one two three four times and vanished, plunk, at five. Not bad. He looked around for another suitable rock.
At first he thought it was a log washed ashore—blackened, slick with wet and rot, a clutter of stones and sticks tangled around it. The water surged and retreated in the onshore wind. His boot heels crunched dimples into the shoal of pebbles. Those angles of rocks, that arrangement, the broken driftwood—it almost resembled, it seemed to be—oh it must be: it was a word. L O V E.
And then the log opened its eyes.
All six of them.
Not a log but a serpent, an enormous—
(Everything that is in Nature, the Universall Friend once told the two boys, Stutley and Samuel (the only othe
r boy even close to Stutley’s age) she’d caught beating a little black grass snake with sticks, is of Nature and thus partakes of some measure of God’s benevolence. She fixed her eyes on each boy in turn and continued: In some cases, to be sure, alas, it is a distressingly small measure. But this creature—she looked into its eyes dangling before her own and with a flick of her arm tossed it into the tall grass—is not venomous and serves God’s will by eating the vermin that would otherwise eat the maize belonging to God’s servants. She turned. And now, my small gentlemen, with that lesson well learned we shall proceed with our schoolwork. And with the two of them in tow she strode across the field, long black clergy-cloak flapping behind her and the two boys making faces at each other.)
He stood frozen to the spot.
The serpent bucked back and shook itself, flung out multiple whipping arms, and flapped and flipped up and down in a frenzy of motion. Like an epileptic fit. Was it ill? It fell down and lay still.
Now the stones and driftwood read H O M E.
Northup’s knees just gave out on him, his legs went limp and he sat down right there on the rocks. Terror dwindled quickly, though, swamped with astonishment and, as that too ebbed, with, what else, it must be curiosity—
He found a stick and scratched into the mud E V O L.
And the serpent whistled. A high keening, like a winter wind through pine trees, and somehow communicating the utmost melancholy. It reared back again and rapidly rearranged its sticks and stones to read F R E E.
A scurf of scales rose and fell on the broken water, blank to the horizon.
* * *
IX.
Back at the farmhouse, Chambers paces up and down the parlor.
How long? he asks. How long?
How long what? Northup asks.
How long has God’s good earth been infested with these—these—monstrous vermin?
Northup sighs, shakes his head.
How long? Chambers asks.
A lifetime. Fifty years or more.
Fifty years!
Northup nods.
What hope, then, in ridding ourselves of them? What hope of surviving the onslaught? What hope for our children, our families? What hope for the future of us all?
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