The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  In point of fact, concluded Mrs Carson, as she bent to put two loaves of sourdough bread into the oven, she had found the rooming house on Bush Street that very same day, and soon came into possession of it (another complicated tale for another time, she said), and a wonderful place it had proven to be, as I now knew for myself; “and on that note I will conclude, Mr Stevenson,” she said, “for dinner will be ready in eight minutes exactly, and if ever there was a dinner to eat steaming from the pan, it is fresh herring, so will you find Mr Carson, and bring him to the table, with my affectionate compliments?”

  February 1, 1880, Oakland

  Dearest Louis,

  The briefest of notes to say we are all recovered here at last, and await a visit Saturday by the estimable R. L. Stevenson, of the Stevensons of Edinburgh, a young author of whom much will be known in future, and the world will ring with applause and approbation, for centuries to come too, so that centuries from now, on any one day in a hundred countries, you will find a reader absorbed utterly in his books, and books of every kind!—such books as were never written before, and never could be imitated after, for the very dash and verve and wit of the man himself was in them, shot through every sentence, enlivening every page, so that his books glowed and sizzled on the shelves, and had to be taken out regularly and read for an hour, to calm their feverish energies!

  Your most loving,

  Fanny

  The rooming house, I should say, was occupied by more than the Carsons and myself; but the other residents were in the main temporary, a few days or a week at a time, so that my acquaintance with them was slim as a rule, although there were a few with whom I conversed at some length, absorbed by their stories and their manners of telling them; I think now that the house on Bush Street was a sort of literary university to me in ways that my own university in Edinburgh had not been, though the streets and lanes of that gray city taught me much about human nature and its many characters and flavors. But so did Bush Street, and as I was near thirty, and about to be married and a sort of father, perhaps I was much the better student of genuine story than I had been at twenty, when I was mostly absorbed by flash and dash.

  Most of the other brief residents were maritime men, who came to Bush Street because of Mr John Carson, who appeared to know every sailor, chandler, dockman, boatswain, and able-bodied seaman who had ever passed through the city; it was wonderful to see him greet this one in Spanish and that one in Russian, and to make gestures of goodwill and companionship in the physical vocabularies of a dozen nations, bowing low to the second mate from China and hailing the man from Melbourne in the rough sunny language of faraway Australia, a culture that seemed to use a flurry of fists as a genial how-do-you-do.

  But it was not just seafolk who enlivened Mrs Carson’s house; I remember two girls from Ireland who passed through, staying two and three weeks, respectively, until they found work as maids, the neither of them speaking a word during their residence except to Mrs Carson, and that in the melodious Gaelic; not even Mr Carson’s bonhomie could elicit a syllable from them, though the Lord knows he tried; he was a man of the most friendly attentiveness, and he saw plain that they were terribly frightened and lonely. But they huddled near Mrs Carson like fawns behind their doe, until she saw them off to their new positions; and it tells you something of Mrs Carson that she walked them herself to their new houses, and had thorough discussions with the people there, before she would deign to leave; and in each case she returned twice a week to that address for a while, before she was assured that all was well and her chicks were safe.

  I remember a man with a wooden leg, who said his name was Silver, and who told entrancing stories of the South Seas; and there were two men who claimed to be fallen royalty, swindled of their inheritances by devious means; there was an actor whose particular skill was performing famous oratorical passages, while dressed as that original person, so that his trunk was packed with the costumes of Cicero and Pericles and Demosthenes, who all appeared to have worn the same voluminous gown. There was a man who had been a bear hunter in the furthest reaches of Canada, where he swore there were blue bears, and white bears, and bears twice as tall as the tallest man; I remember him particularly because he looked rather like a bear himself, grizzled and furred all over, and wearing a claw from a bear he said he had personally fought several times, each time to a draw, and finally he and the bear had exchanged gifts as tokens of grudging respect, the bear surrendering a claw, and the man one of his rear teeth; and indeed he had a back tooth missing, as he was quite happy to show us.

  It was one brief resident in particular, however, who led me to the next of Mr Carson’s remarkable adventures, and it came about this way. One evening, as Mr Carson and I sat by the fire smoking after dinner, there came a knock on the door, and in came an older gentleman; it was a terribly wet night, as I recall, and Mrs Carson helped him unwrap his dripping coats, and brought him in to the blaze. For a moment the man stood facing the fire, soaking up the blessed heat, and I noticed his few wisps of hair, and a truly gargantuan beard. Then he turned to greet us politely; at which point Mr Carson leapt up out of his chair, flung away his cigar, and embraced the visitor like a beloved lost brother. I sat there agape at the suddenness and ferocity of his affections; and then I noticed that the other man was weeping silently, his face pressed into Mr Carson’s shoulder almost like a child nestles into the shelter of his father.

  A moment later the visitor had a brandy and a seat by the hearth, and sat hunched and silent as Mr Carson began to tell me something of who he was, and how they knew each other, and how they would be closer than brothers until they died, and afterward too, for some bonds cannot be severed by death.

  “I could tell you about my friend here for days on end, and never come to the end of the brave things he has done, and the admirable humility with which he did them, and the many astounding things he has done since we first met,” said Mr Carson slowly—he was, I could tell, choosing his way among the possible skeins of story, and picking carefully which to trace, and which to leave in shadow; it is a surpassing art, as I have learned, to know which things not to say or write, so that those that do see light are not obscured by tangles of lesser growth, so to speak.

  “I could tell you of the path he chose as a young man,” continued Mr Carson, “and the many young people he helped, and the fine teacher he became, so much so that there are a thousand men today who count him the best teacher they ever knew, the man who turned them from selfish and tumultuous ruffians to be men of character and grace; or I could tell you of what he became later, and is now, as famous in his line as any man in the country in another; but he would be the first to say that what he was, and what he is now by the measure of the world, is not what matters most to him in his life; and it is the day and night that matters most to him that I will tell you, for I was there with him, and I will never forget them either, and those awful hours are what made us brothers for life, and beyond, too.

  “I have told you, Mr Stevenson, that I was here in San Francisco in 1864, as our war between the states still raged; but I did not tell you that I had been in the war, as a soldier, for two long years before that, on what we will call the blue side, the gray being our ostensible enemies, though they were from the same soil and water and air as us, and spoke the same tongue, and in every way were exactly like us. It is easy to say now that the two sides were motivated by a political divide so vast that we must needs shed blood to decide the matter, but I can tell you, and my dear friend here can absolutely attest, that this was not so, and we fought only to protect our friends and brothers from death and dismemberment. That is the only reason that men fight wars, Mr Stevenson, despite what is said about states’ rights, and slavery, and the abrogation of treaties; you may take it from me that every history book is filled with lies, and not one man in ten thousand ever ponders which prince ought to have the throne, or which river ought to be the national boundary, or which side shall have the coveted farmland, and which the
exhausted fields of nettle; no, all we think about, as we charge at each other with weapons at the ready, is that those men would do harm to my friends, and they must be stopped from doing so, if necessary at the price of my brief life. It is easiest to think that they are not men at all who would murder your companions, but the crudest of animals, not worth the price of a lamb, and better off exterminated; and this is how most wars are fought, but not ours, for in our war both sides knew the other to be at least our own countrymen, if not, in many cases, actual neighbors and relations, classmates and boys met once on fields of play.

  “I tell you all this so you will understand the intensity of what happened that day. It was the height of summer—a warm and humid morning, and then hotter and dustier as the day went on, and we men in blue wearing wool; I remember a sudden ferocious thunderstorm late in the afternoon, washing over the devastation like another Flood.

  “We were to attack across a wheat field. There were some five hundred of us, I suppose, and we had no notion of our opposing numbers, or their position; we were told only to attack, and overwhelm the gray line, and advance into the fringe of trees, as far as we could safely defend thereafter. We could see the flickering leaves of the trees across the field—red oaks and white oaks, with here and there copses of hickory and ash, and a huge old black cherry tree. Odd that I would remember the trees so well, but I do, and I can see them yet—burly old oaks with arms like muscles, and the young vibrant trees leaping up where they could find a hint of light. What is more beautiful than a summer forest, especially in this green and blessed land, where creeks and streams wander everywhere, and the air is sown with innumerable birds?

  “The birds—perhaps that should have been a sign for us, that the birds were silent or absent, but we did not read it, because we were exhausted, and filled with trepidation, and weary beyond words after two days of furious battles, during which most of our friends had been slain or horribly wounded. I remember that we sprawled at the edge of the field, resting as best we could before the assault; and there was a curious haunted feeling among us, as if each knew we would not see another day, but be killed almost to a man; and that battle was one where it would be better to die, than to live on without your legs, or arms, or the bottom half of your face—better to die quickly than to wake up screaming in the surgeon’s tent, and know that the rest of your days would be red searing pain, and all you could reasonably hope for in life was a chance to end it, a chance to finish for yourself what bullets and shells had begun.

  “My friend here sensed our mood, and indeed shared it, as he had shared everything else with us. He was a chaplain—the chaplain, our chaplain, and he had been nearly three years in the brigade, arriving as it formed in New York, and marching with it through all the savagery from the start—Yorktown, Fair Oaks, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and now Gettysburg. He knew us, he was us, and not once that any of us ever knew did he shirk from what he saw as his duty, to minister to the men in every way—he nursed the sick, and bound the wounded, and carried men when they could not walk, and heard their confessions, and blessed them as they died. I saw for myself more times than I could count how he went fearless into the line of fire to salve a man’s pain, or bring him back to safety; and for that quiet calm tireless bravery we loved him, and admired him, and while there were those among us who thought him mad, and his religion a barbaric cult, even so not one among us failed to salute the courage and character of the man himself, beneath the vestments of the priest.

  “So that morning when he arose to speak, he had our every ear, weary and frightened though we were. He climbed up on a boulder, and wrapped a purple cloth around his neck, and raised his hands, and said that through the power vested in him by his god, he cleansed us of our sins. And he said firmly that to kill the men in gray today was no sin at all, but our bound duty, and that duty we must do with all our might and main, and the man who wavered and hesitated would be struck down instantly by the angel of death, and his bones would lie unburied and unblessed, and his soul consigned to the flames until the end of time.

  “I had never seen him in this sort of mood, and while his voice rang and he seemed exalted, it did seem unlike him, to be pronouncing fates so sternly, and to be urging death, when he had for so long been such an agent of mercy; but some strange fit was upon him, and when he was finished there was a roar from the men, and we plunged into the wheat field to attack the gray line.

  “I remember the deep scent of the black soil there, rich and thick and dense and redolent of life and crops and produce; I remember the wind swaying the stalks of wheat, as if a huge hand was idly brushing the earth’s pelt; I remember that lovely line of ash and oak, with the big black cherry tree like a chieftain in their midst; I remember the gasping and clanking and cursing as we sprinted toward those trees; and then I remember the roar of murderous fire that cut us down like a scythe slices wheat. They had been waiting for us; there were three times as many of them as us, and they shot us to pieces, shot us to death, shot us down so fast and so completely that by the time their shooting subsided, a few minutes later, our brigade was a thing of the past, our name only a memory, the few survivors sent to other regiments, the wheat field so draped with bodies that plows will uncover bullets and buttons for a century to come.

  “I was hit, high in the shoulder, and down I went, and that was all I knew until I awoke in the night; I remember staring at the stars for what seemed like a long time until my senses flooded back and I knew them to be stars, and myself nearly a corpse. I managed then to crawl back to our side of the field; I was unsure which was our side until I came upon the very boulder on which my friend had issued his speech, and there, to my amazement, I found the very man, huddled and still. I thought he was dead, until he stirred, and then I thought he had been driven mad, because all he could do for a while was gibber and mew, and scratch at his face with his fingernails like a lunatic.

  “How long we sat there by the rock I do not know—much of the night, I suppose. I remember the awful silence, relieved only by the occasional scream or moan or whimper from the field. Twice I heard voices among the oak trees—our men or theirs, I never did discover. No wind, no moon, no other survivors that I knew, no officers, no soldiers retrieving the dead or retrieving the wounded; no horses rustling, no campfires, nothing. It was as if we had passed into another world from the one we were in during the day, and everything we knew was gone or ghostly. More than once that night I did conclude that I was dead, and this was the afterworld, to which my friend had also been assigned for mysterious reasons.

  “Finally he seemed to recover something of his wits, and he started to murmur broken and halting words: ‘I did this,’ he said. ‘I sent them to their deaths. I murdered them with my own mouth. My words were the very bullets. Who am I to speak of sin, who has murdered so many men? Who am I? My boys, my brothers, my beloved brothers…,’ and so on in this vein, all the while scratching madly at his face until the blood poured down into his coat—and soaking his purple cloth too, the very one he had worn while giving his speech, though now it was torn and stained.

  “I have told you stories, sir, of my time in Sarawak, and on the island of the eagles, and it will be a pleasure and an honor to tell you many more stories of the things that happened to me in various quarters of the world, in the wettest wildernesses and the hottest dry deserts, in this ship and that, in moments of tumult and moments of surpassing serenity; but the one story I cannot find proper words for is the story of the rest of that night, and our next few days. To sketch it in the roughest terms I would say that we walked out of the war, and into the rest of our lives—walking away not from cowardice, or fear, or even horror at the slaughter we had seen and endured, the horror that had taken most of our friends and companions, but because in some way we were dead, too—evanesced, vanished, finished, plucked from this life into some other state—I suppose now a sort of coma, or waking dream. We were no longer the men we had been before the battle. Like our companions who ran int
o the stubble and never returned, nor did we return, but were taken up somehow, and our feet set upon the dark road, and we knew not our destination or direction.