“You swell my head,” our host feigned modesty. Far away, thunder grumbled lowly. “To the boat, my dear comrades, and back to the center of the universe!”
The boat trip back to the floating palace was, for me, stupendously strange. By the time we reboarded the hunting barge, the hemp tea was in full force, raging in my brain unlike any tonic, physic, or poison I had ever met with. It quite surpassed those doses of laudanum given me by my dear papa when, at age thirteen, I had tumbled out of an apple tree and broken my arm in two places and the bone had to be set with a fearful yanking.
All objects—trees, Indians, what-have-you—seemed to pulse with the beating of my heart and to emanate an inner light so that each seemed surrounded by a nimbus, like the spars of a ship at sea that glow with Saint Elmo’s fire. Never had I seen colors so vivid. Even in the gloom of the gathering storm, every leaf, every bird glimmered with awful brilliance. I felt as though I were seeing the world with new eyes. Indeed, the very strangeness, the wonder of existence itself, stunned my senses, so that all I could do was exclaim such silly utterances as “O, my…!” and “Gad…!” and “Oooh…!”
“What’s that, nephew?”
“Those flowers on yonder bank.”
“The Pogonias?”
“Yes, those pink things.”
“Well, what about them?”
“They are amazing.”
“I’m glad thee has finally gained an insight on the lure of botany,” Uncle quipped, and LeBoeuf might have laughed too, though the sound I heard emanate from his mouth was a spine-chilling sort of cackle. The two resumed their avid conversation. I could not follow it to save my life. Though part of my brain recognized their sentences as belonging to the English language, they might as well have been two tom turkeys gabbling over nuts.
Every blossom or flitting finch my eye fastened on seemed fraught with the deepest meanings, a contemplation of which was like entering a magical tunnel, but which required strenuous force of mind to escape. It was not altogether pleasurable. There were moments when I feared for my sanity. The wonder is that I did not conjure up the sight of browsing sloths along the way, so distorted and fantastical were all my impressions. But I did not, and shortly we were berthed before Chateau Félicité, which, of all the sights besieging my brain in the preceding hours, was, without a doubt, the strangest vision of all.
“Woodsman! O, Woodsman!” I cried upon entering the dining room.
It was eight o’clock. A nap and a bath had restored my wits considerably, though everything still pulsed and glowed somewhat. Sitting at table now was our late acquaintance—nay, savior—the noble Woodsman, whom we had last seen departing Shannoah-town on a whirlwind.
“What ho, friend!” I greeted him, but he did not respond. Then, stepping closer I saw what terrible misfortune had befallen the gallant nimrod since our last encounter: all around his eyes were frightful scars and scabs, and the eyeballs themselves, though still residing in their sockets, had turned milky white, like a couple of hard-boiled eggs. “O, Woodsman!” I lamented. “What cruel savages have undone you?”
“It is no use,” LeBoeuf put his hand on my shoulder. “He cannot hear.”
“O, no! Gone deaf and blind, both?” I despaired. “Fate, you are a cruel mistress!”
LeBoeuf sighed and nodded ruefully.
“What has happened to the poor fellow?” Uncle asked.
“Wait—”
The Woodsman sniffed the air, his nose twitching like a fox’s reading the forest breeze.
“Why, my two stalwart friends from Shannoah-town!” he exclaimed cheerfully and in robust good voice. “How capital to be back amongst you. LeBoeuf, I tell you these chaps treated me to a ’possum ragout at their campfire that was the equal of your fine victuals any day. You’ll be glad to know that your companions—that tall fellow and his’n—are safe and sound on the Ohio. I come upon ’em some ways above the falls of the Dismal. Sick as dogs they were, but mobile. You’re probably wondering what has happened to my eyes. No, don’t protest. I shall tell you. I had the misfortune to have been attacked by a great horned owl whilst rambling to Blue Jacket’s Town hard by Fort Defiance on the Great Maumee. I believe the owl meant to attack my hat, thinking it a live skunk. There is a lesson in this twist of fate, my friends. Choose your headgear with care. It is a shame that I had to strike upon it the hard way, but that is life, eh? I’ll get around all right. Still got my nose, anyway, which is what a fellow needs more’n eyes when he sojourns at this happy outpost where the victuals are mighty fine.”
His olfactory organ recommenced twitching, this time in a violent manner.
“Why, either a bower o’pokeweed blossoms or the lady o’the house is a’coming this way,” the Woodsman declared.
The door to the dining room was thrown open and in marched Madame LeBoeuf in another stunning gown of the sheerest silk. Her face, however, was flushed with emotion and her manner very agitated. Yago followed close on her heels, his nostrils flaring. At the sight of the Woodsman, he flinched visibly. Madame seemed likewise startled to find the gallant wanderer at table, and equally aghast at his injuries.
LeBoeuf called us to the table and rang a little handbell. The servants brought on the first course along with an ewer of vin rouge. Our host guided the Woodsman’s hand to his goblet so as to inform him it was filled. It nearly broke one’s heart to see the Woodsman so pathetically reduced in circumstances, though he himself evinced no self-pity.
“Where is Lou-Lou tonight, Monsieur LeBoeuf?” I inquired.
“He is ill.”
“How unfortunate. What seems to be the problem?”
“Carbuncles.”
“Perhaps I should stop and visit him after supper?”
“I don’t think so, Sammy. Too much stimulation may hinder his recovery.”
Two little brown morsels were tonged upon our plates and a rich reddish sauce spooned over them. The meat had a nutty flavor, while the sauce was redolent of sassafras.
“Very nice, Fernand,” Uncle pronounced. “What is it?”
“Les chauves-souris en papillote,” LeBoeuf said.
“Bats!” I said, gagging.
“Myotis,” Uncle offered the Latin, examining a morsel at the end of his fork.
“Myotis lucifugus,” LeBoeuf specified. “The little brown variety, cooked in his own wings, à la Chateau Félicité, daubed with sauce du bois, Americain.”
“Why, this is bat,” the Woodsman now declared, munching and inhaling with great relish. “If there’s anything I hanker for after a spell in the territories, it’d be a fine plate o’bat. This is first rate, LeBoeuf.”
“Tonight we play a little game at table, no?” our host took a fresh tack. “Would you enjoy a game, Sammy?”
“Certainly,” I agreed without enthusiasm.
“Good,” he declared. “The object of this game is to describe your vision of the future here in America, what it will be like, what it will look like, how people will organize society, and so forth. Do you follow me?”
“An admirable amusement, Fernand,” Uncle said. “But how far into the future shall we prognosticate?”
“Not so near that it might restrict the imagination,” LeBoeuf said, “nor so distant that the same imagination might run wild. Let us say 150 years. Project your minds to the date 1953, mes amis and mon cher. What will life be like in the time of our great-great-grandchildren?”
“Now, the Wyandot, who love good victuals even more than they like to make war upon their neighbors, the Kaskaskias, will take a silver-haired bat and deep fry him in rendered buffalo lard,” the Woodsman related, sadly oblivious to the actual drift of conversation. “They sauce this crispy bat in a sour jam made out of crushed serviceberries. That is about the best eating a man might find from Virginny to the Big Muddy.”
“Who would like to begin?” LeBoeuf asked. “Sammy?”
I hesitated.
“If you like, I shall start,” LeBoeuf then offered. “Perhaps it will
spur your imaginations. What will this place be like in the year 1953? Hmmmmm….”
The Indians brought on another course: terrapin cutlets sautéed in lemon grass and butter.
“I see in my mind a society of perfect brotherhood, whites, blacks, and Indians all coexisting in harmony and mutual respect. All former slaves have worked themselves free, or bought their loved ones out of servitude. The Indians of every nation have been absorbed into the mainstream of society. Great cities have sprung up in these woodland wastes, each city planned and orderly, laid out like a great wheel, with broad avenues rolling forth from the hub—”
“What is at the hub of each city, monsieur?”
“A shining university, a seat of learning,” LeBoeuf elaborated, his eyelids narrowing. “Yes, a veritable cathedral of knowledge! Away with the craven, jealous gods of old Europe, the enslaving theologies and theocracies, doctrines, sects, bishops, popes! Away even with government itself! In the society of learned men, individuals will govern themselves. Crime will be unknown because there will be sufficiency for all. No one will envy his neighbor—”
“Thy future sounds like heaven, Fernand,” Uncle twitted him.
“Just so, William. Humanity can only improve, spreading justice, knowledge, peace, and plenty where yesterday was barbarism, ignorance, strife, and poverty. Who knows, but even death itself will have been conquered and men shall live forever. Is that not the essence of heaven, as we understand it?”
“It was once my pleasure to sojourn with the Otos up Missouri way,” the Woodsman injected nostalgically. “They have a way with bat. They take the critter, skinned and drawn o’course, and stuff him full of sweetwater clams. Next, they daub him in Missouri River clay and bake him in a firepit. An hour later, you take out your bat, crack his hardened clay casket, and there you have an unsurpassed delicacy. This turtle is outstanding, LeBoeuf.”
Our host patted him on the shoulder to express his appreciation.
“Who will be next? Sammy?”
“Very well,” I agreed and drained my wine glass. “By the year 1953, cities will stand in this wilderness, perhaps even upon the site of your hemp fields, monsieur. They will be populated by crude, ignorant, uncultivated boors—”
“Nephew!”
“No, William. It is his vision, for better or worse,” LeBoeuf said. “Continue please, Sammy.”
“Their sole occupation will be vice. Drunkenness will be epidemic. Men will sell their wives’ favors for a pint of whiskey. Outside these cities, a landed gentry will work their holdings in constant fear of confiscation by an oligarchical government of swindlers and lawyers.”
“What of the Indians?” LeBoeuf asked.
“Driven north to Canada.”
“How do you like that, Yago?” the Frenchman asked his adjutant.
“I shall miss these forests of my ancestors,” Yago replied.
“Now, your Sacs and Foxes of the prairie do not esteem bat in the slightest,” the Woodsman injected once again. “In fact, they abhor it as a viand. What they like is grasshoppers. They roast ’em in a pan like groundnuts. The taste is similar, as a matter o’fact. I have et ’em once, my friends, and that was enough. Whatever the flavor, you always know that you are eating a bug. Give me a bat any day, says I.”
The servants removed our turtle plates and brought on the deviled buffalo tongue.
“My dear Marie, it is your turn.”
Madame LeBoeuf sighed morosely.
“The future,” she said in a low, spiritless voice, “is a green hell of endless forest, uncouth savages, dull evenings of useless prattling, and beautiful women pining away of ennui.”
“Ha ha,” LeBoeuf feigned a laugh. “You jest, ma chère!”
Madame shrugged petulantly.
“And you, Yago?” LeBoeuf turned to the Indian, obviously shaken. “What is your vision of the future?”
“We live one day at a time,” he replied.
“You need not spare my feelings, nor those of anyone present. Go ahead. Be frank.”
“I see no future,” he said, adding, “it is a white man’s idea.”
“But surely you can project ahead. When I arrived here a decade ago, and we began to build Chateau Félicité together, you and I—why, that took planning, the ability to envision something where there was previously nothing.”
“This planning was yours. I followed orders.”
“Do you mean to say that you had no more idea of my aims than … than a bird in the tree? I am shocked. What a rats’ nest of pessimism we have here tonight!”
A silence weighed on the table like one of the night miasmas that settle over a southern river. The Indians brought on a course of salad: blanched Florence fennel and chicory dressed in vinegar with chopped egg.
“This nation of ours don’t know it yet,” the Woodsman declared, “but it has got a great gastronomical future ahead of itself. Forget your El Dorados, your dreams of Injun cities paved with gold. Look to your bellies, my countrymen. Look to your tubers and squashes of the field, to your fat sage grouses of the prairie, your buffalo beeves and pronking pronghorns, your giant catfish of the Mis’sippi channel, your wild turkey cocks, your parti-colored trouts, your huckleberries, your spring fiddleheads. There is your futurity! You can’t eat a hunk o’gold like you can have at a nice sautéed bat. No sir.”
LeBoeuf sighed and patted him on the arm. “William, mon ami,” he said wearily. “It is your turn.”
“I see,” Uncle’s brow knitted in concentration, “the rise of a Great Age of Science. A thousand and one practical inventions will improve human life, setting men free from the drudgery of the ages. The nation will stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the frozen north to the jungles of Yucatan. America, with its numberless miles of coastline, its forests, from which come a limitless supply of oak, pine masts, spars, and pitch, will rule the seas. Balloons will traverse the Blue Ridge hourly, and people will think nothing of traveling an hundred miles in a day. Great workshops shall arise in our cities and great smelteries for our native ores—”
“What about Negro slavery, Uncle,” I interrupted his reverie to inquire.
“Perhaps this ‘science’ you speak of so admiringly will find a way to turn them white,” Madame inserted acidly.
“Slavery will be abolished,” Uncle overlooked her remark. “Excuse my frankness, dear friend, but—”
“No apology is necessary, mon ami, for you are right. I agree that the practice is morally insupportable in the long view.”
“Yes,” I now put in, “but, monsieur, who will then till your hemp fields?”
“Perhaps I will no longer be in the business of growing it,” LeBoeuf said.
Dessert arrived: caramelized orange segments tucked into meringue nests and topped with filiments of candied zest. Upon my first forkful of this sweetmeat, I felt the familiar and sickening crrrack of a tooth giving way. Pain cleaved my skull like a bolt of lightning in a peaceful sky. I spit the sugary fruit onto my plate and clutched my jaw.
“O!”
“Etes-vous bien?”
“Oaaah!”
“Speak, nephew!”
“Hmph tmph!” I groaned.
“I think he has broken a tooth,” Madame ventured.
“Quelle douleur,” Yago said.
“If you come with me to the library, I shall examine and treat this tooth,” LeBoeuf declared.
“Aagghh!” I cried in pain and fear.
“This is as toothsome a treat as ever I et,” the Woodsman observed.
“Let us not waste another minute, messieurs,” LeBoeuf said and rose out of his seat. “Vite!”
Uncle and Yago helped me up. Between them, I staggered out of the dining room into the library.
“Sit him there,” LeBoeuf said, directing us to a claw-footed velvet chair into which I was deposited, groaning. Orders were issued in Choctaw. The servants scurried hither and thither. A small round table was brought forth and covered with clean linen. A white c
hamber pot was placed on the floor beside my chair. “Use this to spit into,” LeBoeuf told me, removing his frock coat and rolling up his sleeves.
“Hast thee also mastered the art of surgery, Fernand?” Uncle exclaimed in the blindest admiration. The mere word “surgery” was like a knife twisted in my belly.
“Iieeyyaahh!” I whimpered.
“Don’t be afraid, Sammy,” LeBoeuf reassured me, a bony hand upon my arm. “Yago, les spiritueux!”
The Indian fetched a bottle of greenish brandy and poured a monstrous large draft in a crystal goblet.
“Drink it all,” LeBoeuf advised me. I took the glass. The liquor within was so powerful that the fumes alone made me dizzy. I quaffed the entire measure. It entered my bowels like lava and left me gasping for breath. “Excellent. You are a model patient. Encore, Yago.”
He poured another. I downed it just as readily. The pain in my jaw seemed to subside a little. Several Indians reentered the library with a rolling wooden cart. Its wheels creaked ominously. Set into the top was a kind of washbasin covered by a silver lid. Steam wafted up from the lip of the basin. On a shelf below were three spirit lamps, so that the whole apparatus was like a great chafing dish.
LeBoeuf tied a clean linen bib around my neck. It smelled of soap and sunshine. A warm glow enveloped me. The pain diminished another degree ’til it was hardly noticeable.
“Les lumières, s’il vous plaît!” LeBoeuf commanded. The servants fetched candlesticks and candelabra from all over the room and stood about my chair holding them. “That’s nice and bright,” LeBoeuf observed and rubbed his hands briskly. He lifted the cover of the chafing basin and a cloud of steam mushroomed toward the ceiling. Using an elegant set of silver tongs, he commenced extracting various surgical instruments and set them, one by one, upon the round table to my left. His seeming expertise was reassuring. The pain in my tooth had just about completely subsided by now, though I dared not suck on it or explore the tender site with my tongue.
“Why dost thee boil thy tools, Fernand?” Uncle inquired.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 21