by Van Reid
Kachung!!!
Officer Drum gave the upended bar an experimental push, with no result; Officer Beam pitched in, and even when Officer Skillings, who was a tall, brawny fellow, lent a hand, the mass in front of the doorway hardly shifted.
Safely’s face returned to the length of uncovered doorway. “He’s reached the top floor.”
“My word, Thump,” said Eagleton. “This is out of common.”
“It is extraordinary,” agreed Thump. He wished that their chairman were here to lend his admirable philosophy to the scene.
“Are you standing on that thing, Safely?” wondered Officer Skillings.
“Let’s try a window,” said Calvin Drum.
Another face peered out beside Safely’s. “Is that Officer Drum?”
“Yes, it is,” came the calm reply.
“Officer Drum, Gillie Hicks is in an obstreperous frame of mind.
“Good heavens!” said Ephram.
Thump had wandered a little forward where the crowd had given a bit and Eagleton tried to follow him. Ephram took note of this migration, excused himself to the tall gentleman, and fell in behind.
Officer Skillings wrestled with one of the front windows.
The door to the balcony of the Weary Sailor gave way with a bang and all eyes rose as an upright piano came rolling into view. The instrument jarred against the railing, which let out an ominous crack, and the crowd gasped and retreated.
Skillings stepped down from the porch and craned his head back. “Gillie!” he called, as if he were speaking to a recalcitrant child. “What are you doing?”
A large face, the shape of a nicely rounded pumpkin (and with as little growing on it) peered over the length of the piano top. “Duffy won’t play ‘Heaven’s Gracious Choir, Calling Sweetly Me to Join,’” declared this circular visage, “so he won’t play anything!”
“Gillie, what do you intend to do?”
“Just stand away, Officer Skillings—!”
“Where’s Duffy?” called Officer Drum over his shoulder.
“I won’t play it again!” declared a querulous-looking old man in the crowd. “No, I won’t!”
“But Duffy—!” implored Drum.
“I won’t!”
“It was my rna’s favorite tune!” cried out Gillie Hicks in tears. He straightened to his full height now and the Moosepathians could see that he was a veritable mountain of a man. The fog had reached almost to the waists of the people in the crowd, and certain speculative threads of mist reached up along the posts that supported the balcony.
“Get down here, Gillie,” ordered Officer Beam. “You’re as cross-eyed as a flounder.”
“I’m not drunk, if that’s what you mean.” Gillie looked uncertain about his footing, however.
“I’d hate to see him when he was,” muttered Beam. “Duffy—!”
“I won’t play it!” shouted Duffy Wimple. “I’ve played it every night for seventeen weeks and I won’t play it again!”
“Duffy!” shouted Sam Skillings (everyone who spoke was shouting now). Sam pointed a finger at the old codger. “You had better get up there and—”
“I won’t! I won’t, I tell you! Gillie said I played it too fast, and if I live to take instruction from that dumb-as-a-pump chowderhead I’ll eat my fingers!”
“Well, you won’t play this again, either!” returned Gillie, and his head bent as he leaned into the instrument. The piano bumped the railing, and he drew it back a foot or so and tried again.
“Gillie!” shouted one of the officers.
Most of the crowd had scattered from the front of the tavern, the incoming fog billowing about them, and it was only because of this human ebb that Thump noticed that a decrepit-looking fellow beside him was lifting the wallet from his coat pocket. The thief had reckoned on the mob to mask his movements, what with bodies jostling bodies, but he had let himself focus too narrowly on his intended victim so that he was hardly aware of working, suddenly, in the open. He realized his danger in about the same instant that Thump realized he was being robbed, and Thump was so amazed that he almost didn’t reach out in time to grab the man’s sleeve.
“Gillie, you come down here!” Officer Skillings was shouting.
Officer Drum had joined Skillings on the wooden sidewalk to see what was happening when he noticed the smaller crisis between Thump and the thief. “Here, now—” began the constable as he stepped into the street.
As the pickpocket struggled to quit the scene with Thump’s wallet and Thump struggled to stop him, a second man, who looked very much like one of the fellows who had been trying to rescue Mr. Spark earlier in the evening, stepped from the crowd and dropped to his hands and knees beside Thump. The Moosepathian almost toppled over this man’s back, but there was one object in that wallet that was precious to Thump and these thieves could not have guessed at his resolve to keep it. Scrambling like a man on a cliff, and actually using his grip on the first thief’s sleeve for a bit of leverage, he managed to raise one foot and stand on the back of the bent man.
Gillie Hicks, meanwhile, had paused in his efforts against the railing. He peered over the piano again. There was a general sigh of relief. Officer Drum glanced up at Gillie, imagined the moment of greater crisis to be over, and took another step toward the thief, who dropped the wallet rather than succumb to either Thump’s grip upon his sleeve or the long arm of the law.
The first thief bolted down the street. The second thief had fallen flat upon his face and let out a terrific gust before Thump stepped off his back. Officer Drum leaned into a cushion of fog to retrieve Thump’s wallet from the ground, saying, “Who belongs to this, then, eh?”
Above them, Gillie let out a grunt. A gasp rose up from the crowd.
There was a crash as the railing above gave way before the mass of piano. Officers Skillings and Beam, Ephram and Eagleton, and several others in the vicinity jumped aside or threw themselves back as the instrument pitched into the air above the street.
The second thief leapt like a cat from his crouch and charged down the street through the crowd. Thump stumbled, hands out, and collided with Officer Drum, throwing the policeman backward, and nearly falling on him as he lurched another step. The piano’s trajectory culminated in a thunderous heap not three feet behind Thump but squarely on his pinched wallet.
The cymbal-like stroke of disharmonious chords overwhelmed every shout and cry, and the dying notes of jangled piano wires and shivering slats of splintered wood presided over a cloud of dust and a moment of heart-in-the-throat astonishment. Only the dust and the fog shifted; the crowd and the immediate participants in the scene stood, or lay, frozen. At the back of the crowd, Fuzz Hadley and his gang were filled with amazement.
“Gory, Mister!” said Officer Drum to Joseph Thump when he had a moment to breathe. “I believe you just saved my life!”
Officers Skillings and Beam, as well as Ephram and Eagleton, were rushing to the side of their respective comrades.
“My word, Thump!” cried Ephram. “It was magnificent!”
“Ever in the fore!” declared Eagleton.
Thump had a finger in one ear; he was trying to determine if a near sounding note was originating from within or without his head. Just behind his right ear a goose egg was rising where he had been plunked by a flying ivory key. After a moment’s consideration, he decided that the note was indeed coming from inside his head. “High tide at 8:48,” he articulated before pitching backward with a docile expression on his bearded face.
A contrite-looking Gillie Hicks leaned his huge head over the broken railing. “Everyone all right down there?” he queried.
BOOK TWO May 28, 1897
(Morning)
from The Portland Courier
May 28,1897
(Afternoon Edition)
NEAR TRAGEDY ON DANFORTH STREET
___________
Piano Used as Instrument of Destruction!
___________
Officer Calvin Drum Rescu
ed by Local Club Man!
Some time before eleven o’clock last night, citizens at large on Danforth Street were witness to an extraordinary commotion, the origin of which was difficult at first to ascertain. Officer Calvin Drum of our city’s constabulary came upon the scene soon after a mob of people were driven from a meeting place, which is celebrated by its patrons as the Weary Sailor. The building occupies the north block on Danforth between State and Winter. Officer Drum admits that he could imagine nothing short of a fire as being serious enough to send such a crowd into the spring night but understood that other forces were as compelling when he was informed of the inebriated presence of one Gillie Hicks inside the tavern walls.
Mr. Hicks is not unknown to the local police, nor to anyone who even occasionally peruses the court news, and as the suspect is of greater stature and girth than average men Calvin Drum is not loathe to admit that he was pleased to see Officer Samuel Skillings and Officer Malcom Beam arrive fast behind him.
A dialogue of sorts was initiated between Mr. Hicks and the officers, somewhat colored, we are told, by occasional reports from certain individuals who were temporarily trapped inside. Mr. Hicks, it seems, had uprooted the serving counters of the tavern room and blocked all entrances with the same. The crisis was understood to have begun by way of an argument between Mr. Hicks and a Mr. Wimple, who entertains the patrons of that establishment by his skill at the pianoforte, but who had refused to play a certain selection for the well-liquored Mr. Hicks.
To the astonishment of all, Mr. Hicks pushed the piano up to the second story of the building, rolled it out onto the balcony, and, following a brief discussion, pushed it through the railing and down to the street, where it might have killed Officer Drum, or caused him terrible injury, but for the quick action of Mr. Joseph Thump of India Street, who is a member of the recently formed club the Moosepath League (and a longtime subscriber to this journal, we are proud to say). Mr. Thump pushed Officer Drum from harm’s way, much to his own risk, and was himself knocked insensate for several minutes, having been struck in the head by a flying piece of the shattered instrument. Those of our readers who have been following the extraordinary exploits of that society to which Mr. Thump claims allegiance will not be very surprised to read of this instance of courage and daring, for they have proved a remarkable company of adventurers.
The whole affair was over in a matter of minutes, but how close it came to altering the lives of Officer Drum and his family forever! None of us at this journal are aware of an instance like it, and while we applaud our constabulary and Mr. Thump we must take stock of what drink will do to a man, and how troublesome are the wild and immoderate occurrences, on a nightly basis, in that section of our otherwise law-abiding city.
6. The Family Spark
The establishment on Brackett Street had been known for a generation or so as the Faithless Mermaid till Mabel Spark had her way with the titular female. Sailors (and landsmen, to be sure) had always appreciated the inconstant qualities of the sea sprite as depicted on the sign above the tavern door. The mermaid was typical of her kind, with the upper portions of a beautiful woman and the lower portions of a fish. It was the upper portions that Mrs. Spark squinted at when she first came to the Faithless Mermaid. The mermaid was faithless, presumably, because she seemed most concerned with her reflection in the mirror, which she held at arm’s length; her hair was cast behind her shoulders and her back was arched as if she were just waking. Mrs. Spark was sure the creature needed saving and a local sign painter (if not an artist) was hired to do the deed.
It was not enough for the mermaid to be covered by flowing tresses of golden hair; according to Mrs. Spark, she must “wear something,” but in the process of painting the suitable apparel the painter proved a little clumsy and he was forced to do the job two or three times over. In doing so, the painter, who had also famously remade the signal heraldry for the Crooked Cat, a tavern two blocks to the west and one block closer to the water, augmented certain components of the mermaid’s upper portions, and, somehow, in covering her up, made her a little less proper than she had been in her natural state. Mrs. Spark gasped when she saw the redeemed mermaid, but her husband put his foot down. She was dressed and he liked her as she was.
Nonetheless, the mirror was taken from the mermaid’s grasp and replaced with a valentine heart; she became the Faithful Mermaid, and sailors (and landsmen, to be sure) evinced continued loyalty to her and admiration for the sign that bore her image.
Thaddeus Q. Spark had brought his wife and young family to Portland and the tavern in question in 1884, and as faithfulness overturned faithlessmess so did the establishment’s dark and dangerous reputation dwindle before that of a respectable enterprise. Thaddeus was himself more or less honest, if not entirely law-abiding, since his tavern served ale and beer and stout against the strict precepts of the State of Maine’s prohibition. Mrs. Spark allowed nothing stronger (and not an ounce of rum), and the Faithful Mermaid gained the reputation as an illegal drinking establishment of upright character and with a rather attractive sign.
The greatest challenge on Brackett Street—and, indeed, along the length of the waterfront—was to raise a family; there were rough elements to be watched, bad influences upon a man’s sons and unrefined sensibilities regarding his daughters. Thaddeus Q. and Mabel Spark’s daughters were of a buxom quality, and all but their middle daughter, Annabelle, were gregarious by nature, neither attribute being much of an aid to a parent in his cautionary measures. Moreover, the boys were young rovers, if not absolutely wild; but they were good children on the whole. They were all good, and good-hearted, which in the end must stand for quite a lot.
The sign of the Faithful Mermaid swung in the slightest wind, and the sound of it creaking was both lullaby and reveille to eight-year-old Timothy Spark, who shared a small room with his older brother Bobby above the emblem of the tavern nymph.
Tim prided his young self as something of a Natty Bumpo—a Hawkeye of the city; he spent summer days on Brackett Street and in the surrounding alleys chasing and fighting enemy Indians with the warriors of his adoptive tribe, and stalking deer and bear and moose along the wharves with the flintlock his oldest brother, Davey, had carved from a piece of driftwood. Timothy knew the oaks and elms and maples of the city and Deering Park from their broad trunks to their tenderest limbs, and he traversed the roofs of the waterfront as he imagined the ancient tribes had walked the coastal hills; from the highest peaks, he and his friends (other boys less imagined than his Indian allies) watched the comings and goings of the harbor and numbered the pigeon chicks that called from their untidy nests among the eaves and gutters. The young pioneers hid from view of the busy streets like spies and sometimes came home with news and understanding that their parents could hardly credit.
Each night Tim drowsed to the sound of the creaking sign below his window and the comforting rumble of talk and laughter resonating up through the floorboards from the tavern room. Timothy slept well. He rose each morning to the squeak of the mermaid below his window and the clank of pots in the kitchen.
On the morning after the “Danforth Street Pianoforte Demolition” (as that event was dubbed by Portland’s Eastern Argus) Tim woke in a single instant, as was his habit, and sat up in the next but was surprised to find his father seated in the chair opposite gnawing on a wooden match. Thaddeus Q. Spark had a way of occupying a chair, developed from years of waiting upon his customers’ slightest whims, that indicated he would not be doing so very long; he always sat at the very edge of his seat, his hands on the arms of his perch (if it had any) or on his knees. His head erect, his attention forward, a sprinter could hardly want a better starting position.
This morning, Thaddeus’s head was cocked to one side, just a tad, and his hands were folded in his lap; he sat well forward and looked like a good surprise would knock him out of his chair. “Good morning, Chief,” he said.
“Good morning, Daddy.” The boy scratched his nose, then his shock
of blond hair. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you, I guess,” said the father indulgently.
“You could have woke me.”
“I could have.”
“What is it?” asked Tim.
“How old are you now? Eight?”
Tim nodded. “Eight and a half.”
The father nodded, his great beard wagging, and he chuckled, his high voice piping in short trills. “Chief Spark,” he teased, but with a smile beneath that remarkable brush and enough regard in his expression that even a young lad like Timothy could not take umbrage. “Get dressed there, fellow.”
“It’s raining,” said Tim. He peered from the window at the wet street
“Well, it is,” said Thaddeus.
“What is it, Daddy?”
“Want to come along with me this morning?”
Tim halted in the midst of pulling on his trousers. “Where are we going?”
“Your Uncle Gill got himself into a fry last night.”
This interested the boy. “Is he all right?”
“He’s in jail,” said Thaddeus.
“Are we going to break him out?” wondered Tim.
Thaddeus let out a chirp of astonishment. “No, we’re not going to break him out! Who do you think we are, the James Gang?” He laughed heartily. “Break him out! If your mother could hear it, she might help you try.”
“Did they catch him at the wharf?”
“No, it wasn’t that. He got himself in a fix, is all, but it would have been a tighter fix if not for the fellow we’re going to visit this morning.”
“Who is it?”
“You don’t know him.”
“Oh.”
“Although, I dare say, you’ll think you do when you see him.” This observation occasioned something like a short laugh from Thaddeus.