The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  “It is vague to me now, what we did; we staggered north and east, along streambeds and through forests, walking at night and sleeping in thickets during the day. I believe that we followed the moon, as I have a dim recollection of plodding along the path it drew for us. We held hands sometimes, like small children; sometimes I carried my friend awhile; once he carried me, along the shore of a lake; I remember his feet dragging and shuffling in the shallow water, and the murmur of owls in the forest.”

  I stole a glance at the bearded man, Mr Carson’s friend, and found him sitting hunched forward in his chair, his face in his hands, the firelight playing over his sparse gray hairs; as I watched Mr Carson reached over and most tenderly put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and his friend reached up instantly and gripped Mr Carson’s hand with all his might.

  “There is not much else to tell,” said Mr Carson quietly. “It seems to me that we walked a very long time, and then finally found refuge with a pastor in a small mill town; he recognized my friend as a fellow priest, and betook himself to care for us, and give us shelter. I can see his face yet, but have lost his name; I believe he may have been a student at the college where my friend worked before he entered the war. A silent man most of the time, and terse when he was not silent, but for all that a gentle soul, who asked us no questions, but let us slowly come back to life in his rectory—my shoulder healing, my friend’s mind returning.

  “My friend says that what he remembers of that time is certain angles of light, like messages or mysterious letters, and the music of rivers and creeks and streams, to which he became much attached, and along which he spent most of his time, as he recovered his balance over some weeks; but what I remember is a night when the pastor asked us to come with him to confront a farmer who was, the pastor told us, essentially enslaving a foreign servant. He did not share any more detail, but asked us to provide our military bearing and physical ‘substance,’ as he said, while he endeavored to make things right. This we did, of course, and not only in gratitude to the pastor but with an honest interest in freeing an innocent captive; what else, as my friend here said, was the war for, if not to murder the system by which one man sells and buys another, or purchases girls for his amusement?

  “That evening’s odd work by itself would be a story for a week by the fire, but suffice it to say that the pastor did persuade the farmer to relinquish his hold on the girl, with some disputation on the farmer’s part overcome by sensible calculation of forces for and against his point of view. My friend and I waited on the porch, as the pastor helped the young lady prepare her exit; the farmer had agreed to provide a horse and carriage to expiate his debt; it turned out he had never paid the girl a cent in the long months she had worked there as a kitchen maid, with constant assaults upon her dignity, and abuse heaped upon her for the slightest error, though she had never been a maid, and did not speak our language, and there was no wife or additional servant to instruct her in the ways and whims of the house; in effect she was entrapped and imprisoned, with no appeal or chance of redress, until the pastor had realized her straits.

  “That was another moonlit night, as I remember; the carriage was to head straight down a lane washed by the light, and all that awaited was the girl herself, gathering the last of her scarce possessions. Finally out came the pastor, walking with her, and helping her up into the carriage; my friend and I were on the porch, keeping an eye on the angry farmer. The pastor stepped back from the carriage, and the girl made ready to go, but just then, for some reason—perhaps curiosity about the men who had helped to free her—she turned and looked at us. It was only for a second or two, and then away she clattered down the road; but in that instant I saw the face of the girl in the stone village!”

  And just then, as if mentioning that face had been a clarion call, Mrs Carson appeared, with black coffees for each of us, and a bowl of steaming oyster soup for the bearded man: “It will restore you better than any medicine could, as you will remember from the last time,” she said, and he stood and bowed and kissed her hand, a gesture I had rarely seen in America, and rather missed, as a sign, from man to woman, of courtly respect, or reverence.

  So the moment was broken, and the story suspended, and the time to retire soon upon us. Mr and Mrs Carson said goodnight, and as I prepared to go upstairs I asked the gentleman his plans—a few days enjoying the city, or exploring the wild mountains and pastoral valleys? No, no, he said; he was in the city just for tonight, and had come specifically to see Mr and Mrs Carson, who were something like medicine to him, restorative, resurrective, in the language of his theology; he could not go a year without their presence in his life, even in the briefest dose, like now, for reasons he did not wholly understand. He supposed, he said, that if you tried to explain it sensibly, you could say that he saved my life, and she is, as you see for yourself, a pure clear energy of rare quality, so exposure to my savior, and to a soul as genuine and refreshing as Mrs Carson, is of course a happy jolt; but there is more to it than that, much more. It has something to do with restoration and resurrection; that is as close as I can come to articulating it. I need to see them and hear them and have them physically about me sometimes; I need to drink them in, to hear their voices, to feel their hands on my shoulder. I fear that there will come a time when they are dead and I am not; and should that sadness ever come to pass, I know that I too will soon be dead, for I believe that if they are not in this world, soon enough neither will I be; but I do have faith, I do believe with all my heart, I know, as man and priest, that I will be reunited with them in the world to come; and that conviction is sometimes the one thing that sees me through the dark nights that we all face—priests perhaps above all other men.

  And in the morning he was gone, “back to his beloved college in the faraway fields,” said Mr Carson with a smile; and Mrs Carson, to honor and celebrate his brief visit, made the most appetizing bubbling oyster stew that night, and Mr Carson found bottles of dusty old Beaujolais, and we had a wonderful dinner, augmented by several maritime friends of Mr Carson’s, briefly in the city and visiting their old shipmate before heading back into the Pacific; I well remember those men around the table murmuring the names of their past and future ports of call, even the names so alluring and redolent and whispering of sunlight and sheets of sudden rain and remote beauty almost beyond the reach of words to describe it: Papeete, Moorea, Manihiki, Raiatea, Huahine, Rarotonga, Upolu …

  5

  THOUGH I HAD BUT PENNIES IN MY POCKET at that time, still, I was curiously rich in time to spend as I saw fit, for while I tried to work ten or twelve hours a day at my desk, eventually my imagination would falter and wane, and I would have to stand up and move about, and even, occasionally, blessedly, eat; I knew myself well enough as a writer by then to know that anything written in exhaustion would be prim and wan and dessicated, and not worth the ink on the page. Even then, while still in my twenties, I was dimly aware that there was one sort of writing that discusses and comments and informs, at best usefully, and sometimes quite beautifully; but there is also another sort of writing altogether, that uses every conceivable tool and angle and approach and trick and sleight-of-hand to reach for that which is deep and inarticulate in each one of us; and it was on Bush Street that I first began to perceive that I might be capable of this latter thing.

  I had loved the essay, for it is the form closest to the human voice, closest to the general loose and free and untrammeled manner of human thought; but for the most part, when I was young, I did but add to the mountain of mannered essays, poor writings all too conscious of themselves in their delivery, like actors who are trying too hard to act, rather than simply being the character portrayed. But on Bush Street I began to sense that the deeper essay was possible, one that sought, in a real sense, to approach that for which we do not have good words, or words at all; and too I began to see how a fiction could hint at a deeper truth than any essay or article could achieve, though the latter reveled in their veracity, and dismissed n
ovels as only airy wisps and dreams. As I finished the one small novel I had begun in Monterey, then, I began to dimly dream others—novels where I could, at one level, tell a roaring tale of adventure and skullduggery, but at other levels perhaps hint or suggest things we know about ourselves and our lives but do not often, if at all, bring up into the light to examine: our deep inarticulate love for our friends; the ways that we are both dark and light in our hearts, and ever the two sides struggle for mastery; the prickly tool and virtue and sin, all at once, that pride is, in both man and woman; the manner in which a man can be a rogue and a conspirator, and yet be brave and kindly in surprising ways; the way nationality and character can be both glory and prison; the way religions can be wonderful keel on which to build the ship of a soul, and the easy excuse for the most horrid murders; the way the expectations of a father—in a way, the very fabric of his love and hope for his child, exposed for all to see—can be a veritable jail for his offspring, or the wind that blows the young as far from the old as it is possible to go.

  All these things and more I began to believe could be stitched in and among and below other layers and levels of story; and there are times now when I wonder if my teacher in this matter was not Mr Carson, for not only were his stories headlong and wonderful, but I began to hear, like a faint music, some other stories being told, or hinted at, beneath the rush of surface events. It struck me one day, for example, that he had never hesitated to pursue the boy Adil through the jungles of Sarawak, though any number of other men might have given up the boy as lost, or calculated that the danger in his recovery outweighed the call of duty or friendship, or casually turned away, concluding that one less brown boy in a world crammed with them was no particular loss. Similarly there by the rock, at the edge of the wheat field through which so many men rushed to their deaths, Mr Carson did not hesitate to escort his friend the priest away not only from the battlefield but right out of the war itself; and I realized that I had not asked him how it was that he and his companion walked clean out of the Union Army, though the War Between the States did not end until two years later. So it was that I began to marvel not just at Mr Carson’s tumultuous adventures, but at the man himself, and at the subtle currents of his heart; and I began to wonder if he was not very consciously and deliberately choosing particular chapters of his life to tell, in order to tell me other things, perhaps—about the nature and power of stories, about how decisions not only reflect but create character, about how stories actually shape our lives; could it be that the words we choose to have resident in our mouths act as a sort of mysterious food, and soak down into our blood and bones, and form that which we wish to be? We think this to be so, do we not?, insofar as lewd and vulgar language, and look upon those who berate and blaspheme as avatars and exemplars of the foulness they emit, just as volcanoes are made of the lava they vomit forth into the innocent air.

  I put these questions to him that evening by the fire, and he smiled, and contemplated his cigar for a moment, and then he said, “You will remember that I left you, as it were, on the porch of the farmer’s house, in a little mill town that my friend knew well; I will tell you that this house was in Michigan, but I cannot tell you where; but what happened to me after that night is a long story and I believe Mrs Carson will call us to dinner in only twenty minutes. I would be a poor storyteller indeed did I compress such an odyssey into so small a time. Suffice it to whet your appetite when I say that from there to here entailed a train, a riverboat, a riveting man named Tondzaosha, some weeks spent in the forests and inlets of western Canada, and finally a stroke of luck that still gives me pause, and makes me wonder if indeed there is a force far beyond our grasp that arranges the affairs of men, or at the least presents them with possibilities, some of which lead to joy far deeper than any I had ever imagined possible.

  “So let me save that story for another time. But I will give you the beginnings of another, if you wish; for I have been thinking tonight of a young man I met in Australia, just last year, on the quays of Sydney Harbor, the most beautiful harbor in the world, as we both agreed, and both of us men of the sea, with some thorough experience in bays and anchorages and winds and weathers.

  “The last day of January this was, which is the height of summer there, on the other side of the world; and I was between ships, having left one and not yet found another; and in the ancient way of mariners I went down to the docks, just as you do sometimes here, for reasons you cannot name—myself, I think there is a yearning in every man for the sea, perhaps because it is the mother of all things, the place from whence emerged first life, says my friend Mr Wallace; and if Mr Wallace says a thing, you may take it as being so.

  “You are an author, Mr Stevenson, and I am only a sailor, but not even you, I think, could find words for the beauty of a high summer day in that loveliest of cities, that driest and strangest of countries. The clarity of the sun, seemingly coming from a different angle than we are used to here on the top half of the world; the bright red parrots and the tremendous fruit bats, as big as herons; the immense gum and eucalyptus trees, which shed their bark but keep their leaves; the harbor itself, with so many bays and inlets and secret corners that you could spend a lifetime exploring its reaches, and hardly see the same scene twice … well, Mr Stevenson, I will tell you I see it in my dreams yet, and someday I will return, this time with Mrs Carson, to see what we shall see, and to visit a few people I count among my dearest friends.

  “There I sat on the quay, Mr Stevenson, a man without a care or a worry, for I had been paid off by my ship, and had no fear of finding another berth—there were ships almost beyond counting in the harbor, and every third one of them I could see loose or tied would touch eventually in San Francisco, and need an experienced hand for the journey—sometimes I think all ships under all flags eventually visit San Francisco, which perhaps exerts a magnetic pull on all the craft of the world, and calls to each to visit occasionally, as you would bend your own journey, given half the chance, to see a beloved aunt or grandparent.

  “There sat I, as I said, basking in the morning sun, idly contemplating fish and beer for lunch, when right up before me slides a lovely clipper ship to berth: the Duke of Sutherland, a thousand tons, from London, carrying who knows what, but very probably here for wool, to carry back to England for high and healthy profit.

  “I watched it berth with real interest, for there are few things in life more beautiful than a clipper ship, all lean lines and set to race before the wind, and this one was well handled, so it was a workingman’s pleasure to see it maneuvered with easy skill into its resting place, and the cargo unloaded smoothly and swiftly. Then I watched its crew be released, half and half in the traditional way, for shore leave; and last to depart among this first contingent was a thin young fellow with one of those earnest halfhearted beards men grow at age twenty or so—the youth fully intent on having a beard, and the beard not yet convinced that it is ready for its debut.

  “Up he came to me, where I sat on a bench above the quay, and he greeted me politely—a strong accent, east of Germany but west of Russia, as I read it—and asked if he might sit with me a few moments, to get his land bearings, and converse in English, for he was set on fluency in that tongue, and had read Shakespeare on the voyage out from London. Something there was intent and arresting about the fellow—he was hungry to ask or tell me something—and I bid him sit and unburden his mind.

  “We were on that bench above the harbor for hours, he and I, and I will always remember those hours, I think. For one, there was the glorious panoply of the harbor and its armada of cargo and passenger ships from around the world spread before us—‘one of the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe bays the sun ever shone upon,’ as the young man said, and right he was. Behind and around us the golden glowing city—George Street, where sailors liked to go to eat, and the old King’s Head pub on the hill, a favorite of seagoing cooks and stewards and boatswains, for reasons no one knew. The great lush gardens, the brawling
streets, the bronze stone churches and houses built, so it was said, by the poor convicts transported by the heartless empire to the far edge of the world, there to slave under a strange sun, watched by the unseen natives, who must have many times wondered what manner of men were these, to enslave their own people, and so often for the theft of a loaf of bread, a muttered insult to the rich man, the poaching of a hen when the children were starving.

  “But more riveting than the glittering scene before us was the young man’s talk, for he poured out his heart, and laid out not only his past but the future he could only dimly see yet greatly craved; and more than that, something in him was deeply wise, despite his youth, and his own tumultuous emotions, the latter of which had already almost unmoored him. He had, he confessed, nearly done away with himself at one point, in despair at obstacles at every turn, and only stopped his hand when he realized that he could never then unspool all the stories he felt rising in him—‘stories that must be told, Mr Carson, must be written down, or they will evanesce, and be imprisoned for another thousand years, awaiting another teller—for stories are themselves deathless, and for every one told, a hundred thousand jostle for a tongue to tell them also—but so many never emerge on paper or by a fire at night, and back they must go into the shadows; you can sense them sometimes, rustling just out of earshot—don’t you sense them, Mr Carson? Don’t you?’

  “This was how he talked, mysterious and piercing, so that one moment you thought him slightly mad, and the next a sort of elegant mystic. He had a way of staring at you as he spoke, so that somehow you felt you and he had been friends for many years, though we were acquaintances only of an hour; and too, when he was silent he was a youth, and when he spoke he was a man of vast experience and long contemplation.