The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  “He told me that he had taken the name David, after Gurumarra came to him in a dream and told him to do so, and that Gurumarra had also said he was going to go into the belly of the ocean and explore there, and meet with the beings of the deep. He said that Gurumarra had appeared to him many times in dreams, about once a month or so. He said that Gurumarra was not dead in the way that I thought he was, but would not be able to meet me again in this life, but would meet me again in a next life, and would be delighted to see his old friend again.

  “The boy David told me all these things as we sat amid blue fig trees on a sort of shelf above the beach; I think I will always remember his calm quiet voice, and his laughter when I pressed him about his dreams. ‘I cannot tell you more,’ he said, most politely, ‘for that is not what Gurumarra asks of me. But I am to mark your skin, if you are willing to wear a story or message yourself—the scars are a gift from Gurumarra, and they will help you in some way I do not know. It is not my part to know.’

  “I accepted this strange gesture, if you can call it a gift to have your chest and shoulders sliced with a knife, and I report that it hurt like the devil. What a scene that was! A whole group of men and boys around me on the beach, with watchfires burning, and the older men chanting and singing in their language, and me being carved gently but firmly by a fellow who could have been Gurumarra’s twin brother, the resemblance was so close. A rare starry night there, they told me—I remember staring up at the sky, and seeing whole clans and tribes and seas of stars I had never seen before.

  “The next day I put to sea in a little schooner trading down the coast to Brisbane and then to Sydney, and once back in Sydney I found a ship so quickly we were out to sea before my scars were healed. And soon enough I was back here in San Francisco, after a pause in the Sandwich Islands—yet another story for another day!—but now I was, as you might say, a marked man. What these markings mean I will never know, I think. But I do know that they are a message from my friend, the best man I ever knew, and so I wear them with reverence. How often, I ask you, does a man get to be the very page on which a story is written? Not so often, Mr Stevenson, not so often—and with that, I think we had best get to bed, for I must be up early, and you, I think, have many stories to write, and so you had best be about your dreaming. Remind me someday to tell you about my time in the Sandwich Islands, for that is a land of enchantment and music and scent unlike any other on this earth, I believe. Goodnight!”

  * * *

  By late February matters were both worse and better with me—worse in the way of health, which threatened sometimes to sink beneath the billows altogether, but better in the way of weddings; though Fanny too was ill for a time, and money was nowhere to be found, and our future as a family not illumined by substantial prospects for security, still, there was a gently waxing tide of hope. Her former husband was indeed now legally former, and happily removed from house and children, taking his crushing debts and ill repute with him to the bawdy houses and drinking clubs of San Francisco. The cottage in Oakland was slowly coming into her possession, conveyed by lawyers at their preternaturally glacial pace, half an inch per day, and back two inches on Sunday. The boy Lloyd does well in school, and lights up whenever he sees me, as I him; we speak the same language, he and I, perhaps because he is a quiet old soul, and I am always a capering boy inside the illusion of maturity. Fanny’s girl Isobel seems happy enough with her lively husband Joe, although where they will find money enough to live peacefully is a mystery to all, and it seems to me that he sometimes likes his liquor more than anything else in his day; but it is certainly not my place, penurious soul that I am, to pepper young Mr Strong with admonitions and imprecations. As for my work, I am so nearly done with my book about my sea voyage to America that I should be writing of docking in New York City in the next two days; I am finished altogether and finally with a short novel about a prince that seems to me as good as anything I have done; and there is such a flurry of essays and stories and even poems floating about the workroom that I sometimes think all the seagulls of this most maritime city have come to visit at once, and whirl about the room in such numbers that I cannot easily distinguish bird from book.

  But for the first time, as February began to dwindle and March hove into view, I found that even as I grew more sure that I would soon remove to Oakland, and marry the woman I adored, and begin a life together I had dreamed of now for five years, I would very much miss Mr and Mrs Carson, whose company had become so familiar and interesting and stimulating that when I contemplated its absence I was filled with sadness.

  Even as I knew, or hoped with all my heart, that we would always be friends, and always exchange letters, and perhaps occasionally have the happy chance to meet, in California or Caledonia, I also knew that these hours by the fire with Mr Carson, as he unspooled his endless adventures in various corners of the world, and with Mrs Carson in the kitchen, as she shyly told of her own tremendous journey, her voice gentle and her hands never still, would stand alone in my memory as times of wonder, of absorption, of respect growing into something like reverence. Of all the remarkable men and women I have met in this life, I count the Carsons the most gracious, the least arrogant, and the most generous; and, happily for he who wishes with all his heart to be an author all his life, they were both filled with the most amazing and entrancing stories, which they shared as freely as they did the apparently inexhaustible supply of roasted oysters available to the lodgers every night at the dinner table.

  It was oysters, in fact, which lured a remarkable story from Mrs Carson that month. I had worked furiously one afternoon to finish my voyage from Scotland to America, and on writing the last page, and clapping myself on the back at such heroic effort, I went downstairs for tea, and found Mrs Carson with a knife in her hand, and a barrel of oysters to be shucked. I was in an elevated mood; I could not bear to contemplate immediately plunging into my next book; and I suppose my unconscious mind saw a rare opportunity, for I took the shucking knife gently from Mrs Carson, and sat her down with a mug of tea and a mound of neeps to dice, and asked her to tell me two or ten of her stories, any ones she chose, as long as they were about her own life and journeys, for I was most curious about her own voyage to and across America, and from where she had started, and how she had come to harbor here on Bush Street.

  “Well, now, Mr Stevenson,” she said with a smile, “I am not the raconteur that my John is, or a professional composer of stories like yourself, but if you are going to be so good as to shuck that whole barrel, I will indeed pay you with a story, and count it a fair exchange, for there is a solid hour of oysters there to be opened gently and gingerly; and if you will be careful, and not lose a finger in the process, I will tell a tale only John knows—consider it pried from me with the oyster knife.

  “You know that I was long at sea, coming over and seemingly mostly through the Atlantic Ocean, and that I then made my way across the continent—though ‘across the continent’ is a phrase with three hundred stories in it, certain sure. I could draw you a map, or simply name the regions through which I traveled, and their names alone would be a sort of continental poem, don’t you think? But let me tell you one story. A cold story, a story so bereft and frozen and despairing that did it finish that way there would be no teller of it today; but that is not the way it went, and all because of a strange peppery little man who was either mad, or a saint, or probably both.

  “I waited long, when our ship docked, to make my way ashore. I was a stowaway, for one thing, and would surely have suffered from the sailors and officers, had they found me; and I was now an alien in a strange land, and female and penniless to boot, with not a word of whatever tongue they spoke here. I did not even know what country I was in, although I suspected, given the frigid temperature, that it was legendary Canada, to which many of the people of my native island had fled—Canada with its tremendous ghostly bears, and giant wet forests, and endless snow-scoured plains, and mountains so dense and remote no one even
knew their extent. Some said it was always winter in Canada, and summer was only a holiday declared once a year, to appease residents who had heard of the idea, and thought their country ought to have a summer too.

  “I slipped away from the ship before dawn, in that last hour of darkness during which even guards and sentinels sleep; and once off the dock I was indeed plunged into what seemed like the very lair of winter. There were walls of snow higher than my head in the streets, and alleys impenetrable with snow twenty feet high between buildings. Ice hung everywhere in the most fantastic spears and beards—some of the frozen drippings were ten feet long, and hung from the eaves of houses by the dozens and hundreds. There was ice in the roads, ice lining windows, ice coating stoops and steps and stairs—how the populace of the city managed to move about was a mystery to me, as I slipped and scrabbled my way through the empty silent streets.

  “I was cold and hungry and so stiff and sore I would have wept, except that I was afraid my tears would affix a frigid mask to my face. I could not stop walking, for fear I would freeze right where I stood, and for fear a policeman would find me. But I knew no destination, no refuge, no friend, not even where I might find a fire and a bowl of soup; and it dawned on me that I was going to have to choose a door and knock on it and hope for the best. A church, a school, a tavern where I might find work in the kitchen—anything was better, I realized, than being found alone in the street when dawn came, for surely the first flood of residents would include sharp-eyed keepers of the law, or, even worse, citizens who, having survived their own struggle to respectability, are adamant in denying the chance to anyone else—every country has those citizens, and not all of them blustering men, either.

  “So I chose a door, and knocked hard, and I think I will always remember that next long fraught and frightened minute; I stood there shivering, ready to run if need be, but hoping with all my might that a warm heart would be behind the hand on the lock. And I heard the lock being undone, and the door swinging open, and there was a flood of light and heat from behind the figure in the door … and what a figure it was!

  “A tiny man, and I use the word advisedly; he was not five feet tall, with a bulbous nose, and a scatter of hair like a wren’s nest, and a most forbidding expression; he looked annoyed and glowering and irritated, all stops on the way to furious. And then when he spoke! or more accurately barked, or growled, or snarled; the sound of his voice was so fearsome that I stepped back, but then I caught his meaning, which was, to my astonishment and relief, come in.

  “I did not know his language, which I later found to be French—for I was indeed in Canada, and this was Montreal, and by happy chance I had knocked at a school, and this most unusual man was the door porter. I was to discover that he was also the school’s barber, and janitor, and wagon driver, and carpenter, and bailiff, and metalsmith, and postal service, and nurse, and gardener, and wine steward to the faculty, and even, occasionally, grave digger—in short he did every job that needed doing except anything that entailed reading or writing, because he was illiterate, though he had tried with might and main to learn his letters.

  “Well, he brought me into the kitchen, and indicated irascibly that I should sit by the fire, and then he brought me warm clothes, and steaming soup, and a loaf of the best bread I had ever eaten. As I sat by the fire, so stunned by fortune I could hardly think, it grew infinitesimally lighter outside, and I realized it was morning—my first morning in Canada, my first morning on land for a month, my first morning with hot food in my mouth for years.

  “We think of a life as something composed of years, Mr Stevenson, but this is not so—this is not so at all. Our lives are made of moments, and not the vaulting ones that we think: the moment you are married, the moment you are a father, the moment you sell your book to the publisher, the moment you are sworn into office, the moment you unlock a new house. No—it’s the sidelong moment that matters most, I think—the one no one would notice but you, because you felt the turn of the tide, the subtle depth, the shiver of wonder. I think the moments we remember best are the smallest ones. That moment by the fire was one of mine; a small moment by the measure of the world, but a mountainous one for me. It was the first moment someone had been kindly to me, for longer than I could remember, and I mark it well, and think of it often.

  “I will stop there, for the story of that little man should be told with reverence and awe, and I see you are finished with the oysters. I should be up and about getting dinner ready, for oysters are best when they are freshest, and John will soon be home, as hungry as a sailor on Sunday. But do remember to ask me sometime for that little man’s story, for I believe him to be one of the illuminated ones, the soilsithe, as my mother would say—the menerangi, John tells me they are called in Borneo. Every land is graced by the soilsithe, and how they arise from among us, and what strange and fantastic shapes they assume, and where they come from and where they go when they die is a great mystery; but were we more honest with each other than we are, we would speak more freely of them, for every one of us has met one or more, and knew it instantly, too. But we are so often afraid to speak of the things that mean the most to us, isn’t that so? You of all men, being an author, would know that—isn’t that why you write your books, in the end, to speak openly in print of the things we do not say aloud?”

  * * *

  This conversation with Mrs Carson stayed with me for days, and I spent many hours, as I walked about the city, pondering what she had said, and estimating the tidal moments in my own life, and then too of Fanny’s life—the moment she knew her new husband was unfaithful, and would always and continually be so, for example; she said it was only the hint of a scent not his own, one night after a party at the commandant’s house, that told her the whole tale, and turned her life, and that of their children, toward another point of the compass—east and north toward me, if I was being fanciful.…

  I remember a whole day’s walk, largely along the streets and wharves of North Beach, during which I meditated on just this thing, tidal moments in lives, and realized that so many books and stories depended on just such subtle targets for their energies; I had long thought of writing an adventure novel set in the Highlands of my hard and lovely homeland, for example, but could never see how to set the plot in motion, until that day, when I saw that something like the hero’s sudden shocking kidnapping would set the prose to sprinting. In the novels of my countryman Walter Scott, in the wonderful books of Dumas, even in Shakespeare, the stories are set alight by a certain fraught moment—a grim injustice that ripples into many other lives, the first flash of madness in an otherwise reasonable king, the instant when Prince Hal must forsake the companion he loves the best, if he be the man he must.

  Long I walked that day, and even now, many years and miles away from those windy wharves and stony streets, I remember the weather, and the surge of wild current through the Gate, and the faintest clatter of wagons and marching men from the Presidio, and the rough music of many languages along the water’s edge—I thought I could make out Portuguese and Spanish, and Russian and Finnish, and Chinese, and a dozen accents of English and American, and even once, I thought, the round soft burr of my own Scottish—an in-between tongue, Scottish is, still half wild ancient Scots Gaelic and half the imperial English that rose from my home island to take much of the world. I spun on my heel and sought for that voice for almost an hour, to no avail, and finally walked back up to Bush Street, homesick for the first time in many months. I had come halfway around the world to marry Fanny, and here I was alone, still unmarried, still unknown, still counting pennies desperately every morning to see if there were enough for bread with coffee. But I did have good friends, I realized, not one but two; and I had been slathered beyond all expectations with unforgettable stories, which are better than bread, for a writer; and I had hopes, high hopes, of a life with the woman I loved most in this life, though she be across the bay, which sometimes seemed nine oceans wide to me, in the hours when I was weary, an
d there was no wind to fill my sails.

  8

  ONE FINE DAY A FRIEND OF MINE from my stay in the Carmel Valley stopped up in San Francisco to see me, and in the course of a long morning’s perambulations we fetched up along the wharves on the north side of the city, whereupon a fisherman he knew pressed a tremendous salmon upon him, as payment of some sort of ancient debt; my friend attempted, laughing, to decline the payment, or at least postpone it for another time when he might have a cart or a sturdy son to bear the fish home, but the fisherman would not be denied, and who, in the end, can argue with the gift of a tremendous fish? Even Our Blessed Lord loved fish, as you remember, and conducted miracles with fish, and asked for fish as His first meal when awakened from the tomb. So finally we accepted the fish, and made a remarkable spectacle of ourselves carrying it home to Bush Street. Picture a gaunt young Scot, thin as a stick with a jacket, and a scrawny leathery man, aged seventy-two, the two of us together weighing surely less than our increasingly redolent burden, and you will see why we caused uproar and merriment all the way back to Mrs Carson’s, where we considered that the salmon would meet his or her most savory fate.

  My friend stayed for dinner, at Mrs Carson’s invitation, and well he did so, for not only did they get along famously, but his occupation—he was a bear hunter, and by all accounts a famous one up and down the California mountains—led to a story from Mrs Carson that unlocked a great puzzle for me. But let me set the scene properly, and give my friend Anson his own inimitable voice, and let his story lead to hers, as would happen in a proper book, were there such a thing as a Proper Author hereabouts to make one.