The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World

by Brian Doyle

  To you confidentially I will confess that I lay awake more often than I would like, pondering even this sort of once-removed fatherhood; it will be complicated and mysterious enough to try to be a decent and attentive husband to Fanny, who deserves exactly that, and I am not thoroughly confident that I can be that man all day every day. But I hope for the best: I love her and she loves me, and we want to exalt each other, and be of every assistance in the other’s elevation; she understands my hunger to write such books as were never composed before in this world, and I understand her own creative desires—though what form they will take is a mystery all round. She wants to write, she does occasionally write; but it is that word “occasionally” that is the sticky wicket, between you and me. I do not think that someone who dabbles in the inky art will ever find the deep reaches you can touch sometimes with hard and steady work, the days when you are astonished by what has leapt from your pen, the moments when you look up, after some hours of absolute concentration, and realize that the day is flown, and you are sitting in a chilly room in San Francisco, and not on a wild crag in Scotland, or a glowing isle in the South Seas, or in the deepest icy caverns of the moon.

  But the boy, the boy—what do I know of children, Colvin? I never had a brother or sister; I played alone and hardly had a friend until university years; I spent more time with my nurse Cummy than I ever did with neighborhood rascals, or close cousins, or schoolmates; indeed I spent more days out of school than in, being so sickly, and I doubt one in ten of my fellow scholars would remember my name, let alone a shared adventure. I have spent very little time with the children of my friends; I never taught or instructed a child in class or kirk; I have no issue of my own, and almost certainly never will, Fanny being forty years old. What do I know of children, who so recently was a child myself, deep into his twenties? Nothing: and the one shred of hope I have for my performance as a stepfather is that at least I have no experience to decry and disavow. It is all a clean slate for me, and there is just the one boy, after all—although I suspect that he is, as we all are, a hundred persons at once, depending on the hour, the weather, and the quality of his breakfast.

  I must conclude here; I am away to the ferry to meet Fanny, in the city for dinner. I cover the pressing news quickly—the divorce is done, the deed to the cottage will be hers in a week, my financial situation is greatly righted by the letter from my father promising assistance, and my excellent and discerning friend Colvin will sell the enclosed pieces faster than a Scotsman can sing his favorite Burns air. In short order I will be married, Colvin—married! Me, of all the blessed men on earth! And no man was ever happier at the prospect, despite his secret fears about becoming husband and father all at once, bachelor to patriarch in a twinkling. I believe it will be a day in May, our wedding, probably at the cottage itself in Oakland; with all my heart I wish you could be there, though I know you and all our friends will be there in spirit, smiling broadly and reaching for the best of the wines. It will be a family affair, I suppose, with perhaps only Lloyd and his sister Isobel and her husband Joe in attendance, as the dashing Lieutenant Osbourne has not been invited; but I am of a mind to invite my two good friends here, my subtle landlady and her most interesting husband, with whom I spend many hours by the fire, hearing the most remarkable and unforgettable tales of his life and adventures. Was I the writer I so wish to be, I would devote a whole tremendous book to his adventures in various regions of the world, for no man I ever met has traveled so widely and well; but first I must finish the work I have before me, and then marry the woman I love, and after that we shall see what strange fate befalls the undersigned,

  Who is ever your most appreciative

  and thankful friend,

  R.L.S.

  “When last we spoke,” said Mr Carson by the fire, “I was at sea, as it were, homeward from Australia, headed eventually to this very house, though I did not know that then; and while I may have mentioned that I was awhile among the Sandwich Islands, it is another port that absorbs me this evening. Our ship made a number of landfalls—it was a trading vessel, and as I remember it stopped in Nouméa, Suva, Apia, and Rawaki, and even the recitation of those tropical names brings me back to those remote islets and atolls, so far from cities that you could well imagine you had never seen a building without a thatch, and always had walked in singing sand, under drifting birds of every color, never far from the seethe of surf.

  “And then across the long empty continent of the North Pacific, day after day sliding through the gray seas; it was a stormy passage, to be sure, though it was a good ship, and a good crew, some of whom I see still, when they are in the city, looking for berths—good crews stick together beyond their time on the ship, you know, and often seek ships together, in twos and threes; and even occasionally a whole complement of men will sign onto a ship as a package, from mates down to the able-bodied and ordinary seamen. The two fellows who talked about Robert Emmet that night—they were mates of mine on that ship from Australia to Canada.

  “Finally we arrived in Fort Victoria, which is on the tip of Vancouver Island. Now, I had been in Victoria here and there, and politely disliked its imperial hauteur, but I had never been up into the dense wilderness of the island itself, and a shipmate volunteered to steer me around, as he had friends in every little settlement and logging camp. Neither of us had a care in the world just then—we’d been paid off fair and honest, it was high summer, and we were fancy-free and curious. I had heard many stories about it; that it was the thickest jungle in North America, that there were otters and salmon there longer than the tallest man, that cougars were as common as street-cats, that the island had its own species of forest wolf, and that the people who had lived there for thousands of years were able to vanish as they liked, and turn themselves into birds in the blink of an eye, and talk to animals as if they had walked together from the womb.

  “These were the Kwakwaka’wakw people, on the north end of the island, and it was among them we stayed a few weeks, after making our way up the inland coast of the island. What a trip that was, north to Kwakwaka’wakw country! Not once did it rain, not once did we encounter the slightest trouble, not once did we fail to find a meal when hunger shook us by the hand; it was like we were boys again, adventuring in the woods in summer, though both my friend and I were astounded by the sheer size of things there, so unlike our native cragland and rocky farms. Such trees as you could not even see their peaks; more eagles and fish-hawks than jaybirds and crows; and many times we surprised bears along the shore, for the bears there are excellent fisher-folk, and no tide pool is beyond their reach, that I noticed.

  “But beyond my natural curiosity about this teeming wilderness, beyond my urge to explore new land and see new sights, was some other subtle thing, and I am at a loss even now to find words to explain or articulate that thing. I suppose it had something to do with the young sailor on the bench in Sydney Harbor; it was he who saw something in me that I had not perhaps admitted, though I think I always knew it—that I was absorbed and riveted by the girl from the stone village. I did not know her name, I knew nothing of her life, it was inconceivable that she would have escaped that lonely mountain, and found her way off the island, and across the sea, and across the terrific sprawl of this continent; but I tell you I felt some powerful and inchoate draw, some inarguable insistence, some magnetic force that I could not resist, had I wanted to; but I had no thought of resistance, and went ever north, until I had come among the Kwakwaka’wakw.

  “There are many stories I could tell of that time, for that is a riveting people, and there are many stories and legends about them; that their ancestors came to the island as fish and birds and bears and otters, and once home where they were meant to be, shucked their animal skins, and took the forms of people, though there were Kwakwaka’wakw people when I was there who could return as they liked to their ancestral shapes, and did so occasionally, as I more than once saw for myself. They were mostly fishers, and masterful at the craft, thoug
h they also knew every part and plant of their land that could produce food. As with any people there were great ones among them and craven ones, the gentle and the greedy, the generous and the prim; I knew a few to be thieves, and one to be a rapist, although he vanished when we were there, and while it was commonly said he had left the island, I suspect his spirit also left his body in that place, and his body returned to the ocean from whence his people came.

  “They were no sort of noble savages, as some imagine wilderness people to be; they kidnapped and abused slaves, and they went to war, and they allowed layers of incomprehensible privilege in their society, just as we do in ours, whereby one man lords it over another for no discernible reason other than the accident of his parentage, or the riches left to him by genetic chance, or by the spurious claim that his ancestor was a small or large king, whatever that word means; and their men were as cruel and dismissive to their women as we are.

  “But they were a great people also, capable of immense generosity and grace, as I often had occasion to see; the custom of theirs I admired most was the measure of greatness among them, that he who gave away the most was the best man; so that the men they admired the most were sometimes those who lived most like paupers, passing every sort of wealth quickly through their hands into the hands of those who needed it more. Hunters did this as a matter of course, as did those who gathered plants and berries; so that no one that I ever saw there went hungry, or was in need for long. I well remember a young man flush with the triumph of his first elk, coming around to every door to give away a prime cut of the meat. His name was Kwikw, the eagle, a remarkable young man who taught me much about his people and their place. I came to much affection for that boy, and came to think of him as a sort of nephew or young cousin, and we stay in touch, as much as possible, though he is not much for letters, and I am not often back in Kwakwaka’wakw country.

  “Nor is he, now, for his people were decimated by disease, and even when I was there you could see them fading from the land. They were loath to leave, for they felt, understandably enough, and rightly, I think, that as soon as they left their place, they were no longer quite themselves, but shadows or ghosts, unrooted and uprooted. My shipmate, a perceptive man, said also that as soon as they left they would lose their land, for it would be stolen, one way or another, by either business or government, if there is a difference between the two; and while he was right, that was not the first concern of the Kwakwaka’wakw; they mourned the loss of everything they knew in the most tactile and sensual way, the scents and sounds, the way the mist slid in and out of the firs, the wail of gulls, the sheen of seals, the melancholy exhalation of whales sliding by under the terrific stars. The clawing mud, the sift of sand, the scrabble of pebbles in the surf; the plaint of owls, the scent of cedar, the bite of huckleberries from a certain thicket in a certain season—they were convinced that these things were part and parcel of their being, and who is to gainsay them? I think there are many more true things than we know, or will ever know, and the wisest man among us is the one who is first to say ‘I do not know, and will never know, and everything I do know is one pebble among the uncountable pebbles wrought by the sea.’”

  He paused, for a while, and then smiled, and apologized for waxing philosophical, which is one of the lesser vices, and a habit that Mrs Carson, bless her perspicacity, said he would be wise to break; he was trying assiduously, he said, to only wax philosophical on Tuesdays, and so reduce the sin to a weekly thing, like whiskey or cigars, best enjoyed in parsimonious dosages.

  He paused again, lost in thought; I remember the flicker of the fire on his face, and the color of his eyes, a sort of gray and green at once, like the sea. Then he said, “Mr Stevenson, have I ever told you how I came by this mark on my neck? It is a falcon, and it was placed there by my young friend Kwikw, because one day I told him how I had been drawn to his country by a feeling I could not explain or understand, a feeling so powerful I could not actively resist it, though it made no sense by the measure of the world. I had savored my time in the dense wet wilderness of his country, and counted him as a new friend, and stored up my experience of a proud people that I would always remember and mostly admire, except for their constant yearning for the days when they sold and traded and herded other human beings, treating them worse than they did their pet animals. But I felt my time in the north to be coming to an end, and I felt that I had missed something, that something had gone undone, or unrealized; and I did not know what that thing was.

  “He listened with great attention, Kwikw; he was, and is, a remarkable young man, capable of much beyond the reach of words and intellect, I think; and then he went away for three days, on a fishing trip into the rich straits northeast of the island. My shipmate and I prepared to leave, and head back to San Francisco to find a ship; we thought we might travel through Seattle and Portland, to see the new towns where it was said that the residents swam through hip-deep mud, or rode immense timbers, and spoke dialects they had learned from the red-haired people who had lived there for thousands of years.

  “We were ready to set out, one morning, when Kwikw returned, and asked me to come with him to the shore. Down we went, through the halls of the huge old trees, to a little shingle of beach he knew, a place of power, he said, where the falcons nested in the cliffs and great bears came for reasons of their own. He took me knee-deep into the sea and explained that he was going to sew a falcon into my skin, just below my ear, because he had been given a message, and the falcon wanted to travel with me the rest of my days, would I permit that? Now, I was a man of the sea, and knew many a man covered with ink and markings, though it was never something that appealed to me, but I trusted Kwikw, and he spoke so fervently from the heart that I could not say no; so he marked me, as you see. When he was finished he also marked my eyes and mouth and ears with sea water, a sort of baptism, as religious people would say, and then we walked back up onto the pebbled beach.

  “To my surprise there was a man waiting for us there, by the path down which we had come through the forest—a man as grizzled and covered with fur as if he was a bear himself. Not a big man, but something about him was strong; you had the instant and inarguable feeling that he was not a man to fight. It seemed to me he was not Kwakwaka’wakw, although you could hardly make out his face for all the hair and fur—so much that you could not tell where his beard ended and his coat began. He and Kwikw talked quietly for a moment, and then Kwikw said to me that this man would take me where I should go, and that I should accompany him, and trust him implicitly, no matter what the circumstances in which I found myself. The man then approached me, and examined the falcon on my neck, without a word to me; and then he indicated that I should follow him into the forest, which I did.”

  Just then Mrs Carson spoke gently from the kitchen door, saying that dinner was ready; I had been so immersed in the scene on the pebbly beach that I had not heard her footstep, and I startled at her voice. Mr Carson smiled and rose from his chair, murmuring of roast oysters, but I could not refrain from asking him about the furred man—was he…?

  “His name is Gérard Harrison,” said Mr Carson, “and his story is one that Mrs Carson must tell you, for she knows him far better than I do, though I have the greatest esteem for him. I suggest you catch Mrs Carson sometime when she has an hour to spare, and ask her about Gérard; and you will hear a tale that not even the greatest novelist could invent, for its twists and turns and mysteries. Ah, it is roasted oysters! Is there a more alluring scent in the world than that to a hungry man? Let us get to the table before the rest of the house leaves us nothing but dry shells. Shall we?”

  * * *

  I have been at pains in this account to be as accurate as I can, with the soaring stories and rhythms of speech I heard in Mrs Carson’s house, during my months there; but I am well aware that this is not the sort of book many readers want—it is a tide of competing voices, is all it is!, I hear the disconsolate reviewers say, who so wished for headlong adventure, and
a narrative arc, and dark villains vanquished, and tumultuous hearts, and mysterious heroes and heroines slowly becoming aware of their deeper selves, slowly becoming more self-aware—slowly, perhaps, maturing. And what of love stories, a staple of our literature, rightly so? The love stories in this account are already launched, and where is our desperate fellow yearning for a woman who loves another, or our innocent girl pining for a preening cad, or the good woman gone bad by virtue of her own inflexible ego? Are we to read all the way through these pages, and find nothing but the brave and courteous Mr Carson, and the gentle and remarkable Mrs Carson, and the idyllic Fanny Osbourne across the bay, and her young and callow lover, all of them with good manners and the best intentions? Have we no evil and illness with which to contend, no horror and conflict in which to happily be aghast, in that evening hour when we read by the fire, or sprawl in bed beneath the sputtering night-light?

  Trust me, I feel as you do; and this is all the more ironic, for I dream daily and nightly of the books I want so fervently to write, filled with headlong escapes across Highland meadows, and ferocious battles on remote islands, and terrifying chases and hauntings on icy moors, and spirits emerging from fantastic bottles, and black-hearted nobles outwitted by noble woodsmen whose arrows unerringly find their targets. No one loves a dashing tale more than I do, and O!, how I yearn to write one after another, as fast as I can get the words from my pen, and shiver and delight readers of every age from nine to ninety! And I will, too—I will, if He who spoke the stars alight grants me ten more years, or twenty. Surely no more than that, for many times I have already thought I had coughed my last, and the most optimistic soul, staring at the grinning skeleton I have become, would place no sensible bet on many more years for me in this world. But give me ten, Lord, give me twenty, and I swear I will write such books as will never be forgotten, books that roar and sing and chime and ring, books that children hide under their mattresses to read secretly after the house is asleep, books that judges and priests keep in their innermost sanctums to pore over, while ostensibly studying the scriptures of their crafts! Books to thrill children and entrance men and women, books that cry out to be set on the stage, books that will never go out of print, for there will always be those who seek them out to remember that first thrill, and those who stumble over them in bookshops and libraries and the dens of friends, and open them curiously, and are whirled away by a tropical scent, the clash of swords, the crash of surf, the rattle of faraway hooves in the night.