An Embarrassment of Riches

by James Howard Kunstler

  This Bilbo witnessed too, of course, and his loud, opprobrious anathemas drew the savages’ attention back upon us, to Bilbo’s grief above all; for they trussed him up like a Christmas turkey and slung him between the poles we had lately utilized to carry our jars, whilst Uncle and I were merely hobbled and led on two leathern leashes as the party finally made to depart.

  We were all day trekking under a burning sun, and at what was, at times, nearly a trot. We left the course of the river, crossed a kind of beargrass prairie that showed signs of having been burnt over some years previous, and finally arrived late that afternoon, in a state of exhaustion, at Shannoah-town. I’d say we marched ten leagues in all.

  This savage metropolis was built upon a bluff some thirty feet above a good-sized, clear-watered, north-flowing river (the Sandusky, I would guess, which empties into Lake Erie, their “Big Sweet Water”) and was no rude collection of hovels, but a very well-laid-out village of bark-covered wigwams atop an even more impressive series of mounds and earthwork embankments. A sort of Main Street led to a conical tumulus some fifty feet high and very impressive. We were conducted down this boulevard amid a mob of the homefolk, who spilled out of every dwelling to greet the returning band and see their spoils—namely, us.

  Foremost among our greeters were the Indian dogs, fierce, half-starved mongrels as mean as their masters. These were followed by the children, better fed than the dogs yet crueler. They were upon us in a trice, kicking, spitting, scratching, biting, and pulling at our hair and parts while the dogs snapped at our ankles. I tell you, I was in as much fear for my life at the hands of those little monsters as I had been at the hands of their fathers and uncles. Fortunately, the warriors formed a cordon around us so as to keep the little demons and their dogs at bay.

  Beyond this cordon we could hear a rising hubbub. At a signal, the braves parted and we beheld an hundred feet distant what must have been the entire female population of the village, formed into two parallel lines and armed with paddles, some of these fearsomely studded with teeth of the garfish. Bilbo was untrussed, but refused to get up off the ground. A few well-placed kicks prompted him to his feet.

  “By Satan’s horns,” Bilbo croaked, spying the formation of women, “The gauntlet!”

  Our captors formed themselves into a sort of human funnel, directing us toward the ranks of women.

  “Cover thy head and privy parts with thy arms thusly,” Uncle said, and I imitated him. The next thing I knew, we were amidst a chaos of shrieks and blows, and emerged many long seconds after dripping gore from countless lacerations and aching in every bone. The women laughed uproariously at our sufferings. I despaired that they would run us back and forth through this gauntlet again and again like so much meat in a sausage grinder, but this was not to be. Apparently, the gauntlet was a mere welcoming committee. Uncle, Neddy, and I were dragged away to a kind of pen built of stout poles and girdled by an interwoven wattle of tough vines as thick as a rifle barrel. It was about ten feet in diameter, and we were free to move about inside.

  Bessie—who alone among us had not been driven through the gauntlet—now vanished, upon what service I dreaded to imagine. Bilbo was lashed spreadeagle within a framework of poles, where he was subject to the rude goadings of the Indian children. Two braves were posted at either side of the grim apparatus upon which he was stretched. Their job was to make sure the children did not go too far in their persecutions and spoil the grown-ups’ pleasure. Thus, the boys and girls were permitted to twit him, thrash him about the legs with thorny sticks, pull the hairs thereon (for his breeches were torn to shreds), and worry him with smoldering brands. This Bilbo endured, at first, with characteristic oaths and curses before lapsing into a kind of stoical resignation. For all the trouble he had caused us, I felt very sorry for the poor mountebank.

  It was not long before we were honored by a visit from the grand sachem of the Shannoah, an handsome, well-preserved old rascal a decade or more past Uncle’s age, whose thick silver hair hung beneath a black and red cloth turban, and whose earlobes had been distended to form two fleshy loops enbaubled with copper rings. His hatchet blade of a nose was also decorated with a silver ring, between the nostrils. His only garment was a white buffalo robe worn over one shoulder. He had the habit of sucking his gums as if his teeth hurt, but otherwise seemed in excellent fettle for a man of his years. Accompanying him was the same officer who had captured us. The sachem said a few words to Uncle, who replied cool-headedly, despite our mistreatment and our prospects for far worse.

  “They wish to introduce themselves,” Uncle translated.

  “I hope you told them the honor is all ours.”

  “The chief is named Yoosi-hoori Runji-hoo, meaning, roughly, ‘He Who Eats Fish.’ The lieutenant is his son, and is called Oono-wak, meaning ‘Ghost.’ He says tomorrow they are going to make a spectacle of the windigo lashed on yonder rack—and that depending on how long he lasts, I, thee, and the dwarf shall follow. He bids us practice our death songs in order that we may perish like men.”

  “Tell him … we ourselves were captives of this brute,” I stammered desperately, “this … this windigo, and that we are in no wise his confederates.”

  Uncle, himself in one of those heedless moods that are the privilege of the doomed, relayed my plea. The chief and his son laughed. They were a very jocose tribe, one could tell. Just then, a distant rumbling rose out of the north, like thunder, except there was not a cloud in the sky. The ground shook. The timbers of our pen creaked ominously. Neddy howled like a wolf, silencing the dogs of the village, who had commenced a riotous barking at the first rumble. The shaking went on less than a minute, then subsided. What we had just felt was, no doubt, an earthquake.

  Doctor Johnson was right when he said nothing concentrates a man’s mind like waiting to be hanged (or beat to a pulp, or flayed, or staked upon an ant heap, et cetera), for though I was quite giddy with terror, an idea somehow sprang fullblown to me.

  “Tell him that you are a wizard and made the earth shake,” I prompted Uncle, “and that if they don’t let us go at once, you will destroy their village.”

  Uncle gave the matter a moment’s thought, shrugged his eyebrows, and told them precisely that. The old sachem poked his son in the ribs. Both laughed again, heartily, with much slapping of the knees, and then the old man replied.

  “The chief says we must take him for a blockhead. He says he knows an earthquake when he feels one.”

  “It isn’t an earthquake, you black-hearted boors!” I shouted at the two and rattled my cage. “It is medicine, by God, and we will pull out all the stops if you don’t let us go. Do you hear me …!”

  I had grown quite hysterical. The chief laughed again. His son took out an iron dagger and rapped me smartly on the knuckles. This provoked in them another gale of hilarity. The two walked away from our pen, holding their sides and shaking with mirth.

  “O, God,” I sank to my knees in the grass. “What are we going to do?”

  “Die like men, I guess,” Neddy said.

  The evening was fraught with frightful portents. The air itself had grown as dank and sticky as a nervous sweat. We were bedeviled by biting horseflies, who liked nothing better than to alight on our wounds. Several guards were posted about our miserable pen, and though Neddy tried both to chew and burrow his way free, these attempts were foiled. Food was passed to us, but the meat was rank and wormy, and the water tainted with urine, and we grasped that this was just another joke by this tribe of fiendish pranksters. We were also the butt of the children, who, tired of molesting Bilbo, or chased away by his guards, came over to abuse us by rolling red-hot coals between the pickets of our pen, or flinging offals over the top, until our sentries grew cross and chased them back to Bilbo, and so on, well into darkness.

  Through this darkness we could no longer see Bilbo, though his groans resounded at intervals.

  “O, Uncle,” I despaired. “What have I done in my short life to earn this fate? What hav
e you done but served mankind? There cannot be a God—”

  At that very moment a shooting star of prodigious size and brilliance cleaved the night sky, lighting up the village as bright as day. One could even hear it hiss in its trajectory. Our guards were visibly disconcerted. There was some shouting in the village. The dogs barked again. Uncle importuned our guards. Two of them ran off in terror.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That it was another sign of my wizardry and that they had better let us go ere I lose my temper and bring down a hail of calamities upon their heads.”

  That seemed reasonably apt, thought I.

  Shortly, the sachem and the Ghost returned to our prison, both seemingly unperturbed, a’belching from their supper, and in all respects calm and happy. They exchanged words with Uncle.

  “Now what?” I pressed.

  Uncle made a sour face.

  “The chief entreated to know if I thought he were born yesterday. He says he is well-acquainted with the oddities of the sky—possibly more so than we—because he hath dwelt outdoors beneath them some eighty summers, and knows a comet when he sees one.” Uncle grew flushed with anger. “By thunder, I never met with such a tribe of skeptics!” he cried.

  The two savage muckamucks burst out laughing and turned back to their supper fire, a’tittering and guffawing all the way. Heat lightning flickered on the far horizon. I sank back down upon my aching haunches, thinking of rude phrases with which to greet my maker.

  The morning dawned cool and clear, the previous day’s brain-sapping heat banished and the woodland ringing with birdsong—in short, a perfectly splendid spring morning, but depressing, inasmuch as it was to be my last day on earth, replete, what is more, with unutterable agonies.

  A holiday spirit seemed to reign throughout Shannoah-town as the sun crept up in the sky and steamed away the morning dew. Drums sounded here and there, and men tried little jigs as though rehearsing for a later performance. The braves took fastidious pains to bedaub each other with paint while other savage swains dallied with giggling maidens, as on market day in any white town. Most alarming of all was the sight of Bessie, emerging at suspicious intervals from one wigwam and then being led by the hand to the next. The brutes were using her rudely, but there was an added dimension to it that puzzled me. At first I perceived that my feelings for this misbegotten creature had somehow lapsed into tenderness, and that what I was feeling were the emotions any youth might suffer upon seeing his sweetheart cruelly ravished. But then, seeing her emerge and disappear twice more in the space of an hour, a more appalling realization fused in my mind: I saw that she was enjoying herself! There was a strange lightness to her step; and once, I swear, I heard her unmistakable honk of rapture. I sank back into the offal-strewn grass amazed at the unceasing wickedness of this world and almost eager to be shed of it forever.

  At midday, the savages formed into a procession and, with a great ceremonial banking of drums, yowling, and caterwauling, began snaking up their Main Street toward us. They took seats on the ground in a semicircle before Bilbo’s rack, as a house of playgoers might fill the seats of a theater, with much chattering and expectancy of thrills to come. Bilbo, for his part, sneered at them and hurled the most odious vituperations—which none of them could understand, thank goodness. Meanwhile, several braves worked at setting up three stout timbers into holes dug for that purpose about twenty feet from Bilbo’s station. We were shortly fetched out of our filthy pen and bound by rawhide thongs to these timbers. They were like the box seats at a playhouse; close to the action and reserved for persons of distinction—in our case, the doomed.

  The sachem strode to the fore and addressed the lively throng. He seemed to be in excellent humor, and the audience interrupted his remarks more than once with appreciative laughter.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked Uncle.

  “He’s telling jokes,” Uncle reported. “Three squirrels come into a wigwam looking for a jug of firewater—”

  “Spare me,” I said, and Uncle obliged.

  After an half hour of this falderal, the chief turned and addressed us.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “He bids us sing our death songs,” Uncle said.

  “Death song, eh?” Bilbo croaked dryly from his rack. “Try this one on for size, you ruddy savage fucker:

  I heard the merry wag protest

  The muff between her haunches

  Resembled most a magpie’s nest

  Between two lofty branches.”

  Bilbo smiled salaciously at the conclusion of this ditty. The chief and his tribe were well pleased by it.

  “You may all suck my mutton,” Bilbo added pleasantly.

  The sachem asked Uncle to translate. To my horror, Uncle did. Strangely, the tribe beamed and gloated as one.

  “What did you tell them?” I asked.

  “That Bilbo has placed himself at their complete disposal.”

  Two braves of middle age—apparently experts in these matters—advanced toward Bilbo with a basket of fatwood splinters. The first act of today’s performance was under way. Suddenly, though not a cloud sullied the sky, the day grew dimmer. Some of the savages noticed the phenomenon at once, though the principals went about their work. They inserted the first splinter into the meaty part of Bilbo’s arm. He shrieked. The sun dimmed by another degree.

  “By heaven, Sammy, I believe we are about to sustain an eclipse of the sun!”

  The Indians soon began to roister in noisy alarm. Some pointed at the sun. Uncle shouted at the assembled brutes. It was obvious he was telling them that if they didn’t halt their barbarisms at once and set us free that he would deprive them of their very sun. Not a few of them now howled in a rising panic, but their old sachem addressed them calmly and bid them remain seated. Smiling serenely as ever, he turned back to Uncle and challenged him. Uncle did not stop to translate, but I gathered the gist of it, to wit: “Do you take me for an imbecile who has never seen an eclipse of the sun before?” His smugness, however, was short-lived.

  Inexorably day turned to twilight as the moon swung ’twixt sun and earth and cloaked the planet in its shadow. The crickets commenced their night song. Try as he might to lead by serene example, the sachem failed to quell his tribe’s growing fright. Several warriors yelled into the sky as though entreating the sun to come back, while one faint-hearted fellow prostrated himself at Uncle’s feet—much as Bilbo had done the day before to the Ghost—begging Uncle to stop the terrible proceeding, to the obvious disgust of his implacable chief. Then a warm wind arose out of the west and rattled the treetops around the Shannoahs’ clearing, while the somber, twilit air filled with choking dust. The sachem himself now showed a trace of discomposure, for he began to raise his voice at both Uncle and his tribesmen, shaking his fist at the former, as if admitting for the first time the possibility that he was indeed a wizard and admonishing him. Women and children screamed. Braves beat their breasts and chanted. The wind roared and began to swirl with great violence. I myself quailed at my stake at what seemed verily a manifestation of apocalypse. Finally, the whirlwind compressed to a dusty column between us three at our stakes and Bilbo upon his rack. A figure of a man materialized eerily at the center of it, and as quickly as the zephyr had welled up it now dissipated. Standing where it had swirled, his white doeskin suit and golden hair aglow like a beacon in the darkness, was our recent acquaintance, the Woodsman.

  “O-wari-aka Yunno-kwat-haw! O-wari-aka Yunno-Kwat-haw!” the Indians wailed in supplication to the impressive figure, who struck various poses of lordly authority over them. Even the sachem sank to his knees in deference.

  “Sorry I could not come sooner,” the Woodsman said to us, “but I had my hands full with a war party of Chickasaws down the Big Sandy way. Durn me, but you devils made a hash of my friends the Bottomleys,” he admonished the chief now, as a father might upbraid a naughty child for maiming a pet. “And now, what do I find you at, you ruffian, Fisheater? About to make
sport of these fine gentlemen with whom, not a fortnight ago, I shared as tasty a ragout of ’possum as ever a weary sojourner et?”

  The sachem merely looked dumbly up at the glowing Woodsman whilst his people moaned and whimpered behind. Of course, the sachem did not understand this scolding in English—which was performed as much for our benefit as for sheer effect—so the Woodsman repeated it in Shannoah.

  “Shame on you,” the Woodsman concluded with a flutter of his eyelids. He drew a gleaming golden dagger from his waistband, turned abruptly to Bilbo, and cut the rawhide thongs that bound him to his rack. Heaving a groan of thanksgiving, Bilbo fell face down in the dust with a thud.

  “No, no!” I cried. “Leave him there and free us!” But the Woodsman ignored my pleas as though he hadn’t even heard it.

  “Did ever a man have such ignoble partners?” Bilbo observed, painfully raising himself up and extracting the fatwood splinter from his arm. “Yee-ouch!”

  The Woodsman spoke again to Fisheater, angrily, who turned just as hotly upon his son, the Ghost, who railed likewise at two subordinates. Then our knight-errant cut Uncle, Neddy, and me free from our stakes. Moments later, a pile of goods was laid at our feet—among them, I was alarmed to see, Bilbo’s pistol.

  “No!” I protested, but not before the battered pirate clapped the beloved weapon to his bosom and began belaboring it with kisses.

  “Here, dear fellow,” the Woodsman held out a pair of Shannoah leggings to Bilbo, whose own pants hung in shreds. There was a deerskin blouse to match as well, of very fine quillwork, obviously garments of great worth to the Indians. The Woodsman proffered similar raiment to us, whose clothing had been very much besotted with own [O6]blood and the soils of our imprisonment.

  “Neddy,” Bilbo said, “take grumpy-guts and find that chest o’jars. You”—he pointed to me—“come help me find my poor, darling Bessie.”

  “I shall not, Bilbo, by heaven! Woodsman, O, Woodsman, can’t you see that we are the captives of this knave?” I begged our noble, but seemingly oblivious, emancipator.